The handy-worcke of God: experiences and perceptions of disability in early modern writing

This thesis explores perceptions and imaginative frameworks of disability in the late medieval and early modern periods, using a range of religious, medical, and administrative sources to analyse common modes of understanding disabled identities and bodies. I examine non-literary writing through a literary lens, considering the narrative and linguistic framing of disability and its imaginative treatment, and recover the imaginative embodiment of disability within the discourse of everyday life. I determine that practices of care were critical to concepts of family, social roles, exchange currencies and spiritual praxis in this period.
My first chapter explores religion, gender and disability through Thomas à Kempis’s hagiography of Saint Lidwina and its later reception, analysing beliefs about illness, disability and sin, and focussing on the effect of gender on experiences of disability as spiritually empowering.
Chapter two considers spirituality and sickness through Caspar Huberinus’s A riche storehouse, which understands disabled bodies as materially constructed, spiritually communicative devices, conceived of through a framework of metaphor and analogy which shaped disabled identity and spiritual discourse. I approach the text as part of a reciprocal prosthetic relationship with the Bible and the disabled body, with each essential to the functioning of the others.
Chapter three analyses Ambroise Paré’s Des Monstres and its translations, discussing Paré’s taxonomy of disability and the interpretable nature of disabled bodies. I continue the thread of the disabled body as a crafted thing and discuss the representation of disability as performance.
Chapter four explores disability in families and communities, examining care responsibilities, government aid and the social and domestic roles of disabled people through administrative sources. Taken together, these chapters deepen our understanding of disabled experience in early modern England, and the legacy of the attitudes and approaches outlined here for present-day disabled experience.