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Fiat silentium? Deafness in Medieval Thought
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- Author / Creator
- Carrier, Gregory P
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Scholars of both deaf history and medieval disability history have largely ignored deafness in medieval Europe. Deaf history scholars begin their history in the nineteenth century, when the first sustained attempts to educate the deaf began in Europe and America. Nineteenth-century proponents of deaf education established a progressivist view of history, seeing the “modern” methods of the nineteenth century as superior to pre-modern methods of educating the deaf. This presupposition caused them to view the pre-modern era selectively, particularly with respect to medieval Europe. This selectiveness led to a lack of serious historical scholarship, giving rise to assumptions about deaf history that have persisted to the present day. The traditional example for the medieval period was Saint Augustine having apparently considered the deaf as unable to learn or communicate. Augustine has been used as part of a narrative that pre-modern societies oppressed deaf people by denying them their legal and educational rights. To counter this narrative of historical oppression, modern disability theory has proposed two models of disability that treat disability positively: the social and cultural models. These models have been projected on to pre-modern history, giving rise to a number of anachronistic tendencies, particularly the imposition of modern “politically correct” language concerning disability on pre-modern texts and the assumption that pre-modern societies automatically viewed disability pejoratively. A review of the sixth-century Code of Justinian, the thirteenth-century English legal theorist Henry de Bracton’s work, and thirteenth-century English legal cases involving instances of actual or alleged deafness and/or mutism demonstrates that there was a high degree of precision in how deaf and/or mute people were described with respect to their rights. This precision suggests that legal proscriptions against deaf and/or mute people were actually designed to positively protect their rights and property to the fullest possible extent of the law, to the prejudice of any hearing person involved in a case against a deaf and/or mute person. This positive view of deaf and/or mute people in pre-modern law is also evident in Augustine’s thought. A careful review of his commentary on Romans 10:17 shows that he never considered the deaf to be incapable of instruction or communication. In De Magistro (On the Teacher), Augustine carefully explicates his theory of language, using the deaf as an example for non-verbal communication by means of gestures. He concludes that the deaf can express nearly everything that spoken and written language can, but stops short of considering gestural communication a bona fide language. This is confirmed by a careful reading of the relevant passages in the work of the thirteenth-century scholastic, Saint Thomas Aquinas. I also use Aquinas’ system of thought as the basis for constructing a possible medieval, Thomistic view of disability. I argue that Aquinas (and Augustine) would have rejected the modern idea of “disability” and its emphasis upon physical and mental impairments because these impairments are a consequence of Adam and Eve’s rejection of God in the Garden of Eve, an event known as Original Sin. Logically and theologically, Aquinas and Augustine started from the premise that the most disabling event – indeed, perhaps the only disabling event in history – was Original Sin and the expulsion from the Garden, or the Fall. Both thinkers would necessarily have seen disability as a consequence of Original Sin, meaning that every human body labours under an infirmity: we are all disabled physically, mentally, and spiritually.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2018
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Arts
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- License
- Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.