(tbp) The ‘blind’, the ‘deaf' and the ‘dumb’. Liturgical practices of sensory and mentally disabled people

Religious texts often deploy allegorical images of the “blind”, the “deaf” and the “dumb” to represent heretics and non-believers. In this signifying framework, “blindness” corresponds to insensitivity to the light of divinity, with “deafness’ and “dumbness” symbolizing indifference to the Word of God. How did this symbolic framing affect the people who actually lived with such sensory impairment(s) at the end of the Middle Ages? How were they included (or excluded) from the liturgy, including the ritual’s emotional and spiritual components and even the spaces in which liturgic rites took place? Disability history is a flourishing field of research, with ever more publications examining the experiences of disabled people in the past. Yet sensory and mental disabilities remain under-studied, especially in work focusing on “lived experiences”, due to a lack of sources. In response, this paper draws upon a generically heterogenous set of documents, spanning profane, administrative, and spiritual texts. Sources include canon law and papal letters, literary miracle tales (Miracles of Saint Louis by Guillaume de Saint-Pathus), and the visual representation of disabled people in religious works, including in the Bible moralisée. With analysis of this diverse corpus, this paper aims to show that it is possible to shed light on the private devotion(s) and common experience(s) of people living with sensory and/or mental impairment in the Middle Ages.