“We Take Care of Our Own”: Talking about ‘Disability’ in Early Modern Netherlandish Households

Abstract

This chapter investigates how people in the Netherlands talked about disability, poverty, and charity in the privacy of their homes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Around the middle of the sixteenth century, we observe a growth in the ownership of works of art depicting disability that were displayed in dining and reception rooms meant to stimulate conversations among family members and guests. The chapter argues that the more positive iconography of disability that we begin to see at the time was influenced by a direct, lived experience of disability. Kaminska’s contribution offers new insight into how art was able to bring the disability witnessed in the streets into one’s home, sparking private conversations about disabled people, bodies, accessibility, and responsibility within the confines of the domestic realm.

In an essay recently reprinted in the volume Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, Harriet McBryde Johnson (1957–2008), an American lawyer and activist with a neuromuscular disease, shared her experience of strangers routinely approaching her in the street with unsolicited comments: “I admire you for being out; most people would give up”, “God bless you! I’ll pray for you”, and “If I had to live like you, I think I’d kill myself”.¹ Her testimony is not unique: many people with mobility and sensory impairments are subjected daily to unwanted advice that range from pity to admiration to the promise of prayer and supernatural delivery from their presumed suffering. Those comments are based on the assumption commonly held by non-disabled people that what all disabled people long for is a cure. June Eric-Udorie—another author in the same volume—shares a more intimate experience of growing up with nystagmus, a condition in which eyes move involuntarily: “At home, conversations about my nystagmus were sparse, except when discussed as a thing that God would ‘deliver me’ from. […] I was praying a lot, asking God to heal me so that I could have some sort of normality”.² Although the first testimony records public encounters and the second captures both the existence—and lack—of private conversations, they both reveal, first, that a religious framework continues to be a common—if not the dominant—narrative in discussions of disability and, second, that people with disabilities are forced to consider their bodies as broken and in need of fixing.

In Western cultures, this perception of mobility and sensory impairment as a ‘defect’ in need of overcoming or compensating had already been introduced by Graeco-Roman mythology (see, for instance, the stories of Hephaistos and Tiresias) and, most compellingly, by the New Testament stories of miraculous healing.³ In addition, even though biblical accounts of healing mandate compassion, people with visible disabilities have for centuries experienced discrimination and—as we shall see in this chapter—endured accusations of being ‘lazy cheats’. These contradictory reactions coexisted in deeply religious communities whose members conformed to the role of ‘good Christians’ in public, but mocked and rejected their impaired and impoverished neighbours in private. In the early modern period, this bifurcated attitude towards disability is confirmed by, among other sources, the display of paintings on the theme of Seven Works of Mercy in alms-houses and the private ownership of images that stigmatised anonymous disabled paupers encountered in the streets. This has a special relevance today since although we live in a time of unprecedented reconsideration of disability and disabled bodies, the dissonance between the public and the private performance of attitudes towards disability has not so much disappeared as it has taken on new forms, of which perhaps the most distinct are considerations of human biodiversity and what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “velvet eugenics”.⁴ Parallel to these processes runs the perception of conversations about disability as inherently difficult—unspeakable even, as McBryde Johnson has called some of them. Disability’s oft-perceived status of a taboo suggests that the framework of privacy is a particularly productive angle for its analysis.

This chapter offers an analysis of two perspectives on encounters involving people with disabilities in early modern Netherlandish society. I will discuss how images displayed in private and public spaces as conversation pieces constructed the identity of impaired persons as ‘the Other’ as well as how families approached an impairment when it affected one of their relatives. Within the context of the present volume, I will thereby suggest how we can employ domestic decoration to reconstruct people’s privacy and the boundaries between the private and the public spheres in the early modern period. By privileging the visual arts, I show that images developed a nuanced and perceptive vocabulary of impairment and were thus at the centre of early modern disability discourses at a time when no term equivalent to what today we call ‘disability’ existed. Finally, while this chapter explores terms used in the period to define bodily difference, it will demonstrate how contemporary conversational language has preserved ableist attitudes and misconceptions about people with disabilities that persist to this day.

Early Modern Concepts of Disability and Bodily Difference

In the twenty-first century, Western societies embrace some variation of the definition of disability as codified by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. The ADA defines disability—as applied to an individual—as “(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment”.⁵ As Elizabeth Bearden further explains, ADA’s “definition is normative, basing the designation of disability in parts A and B on what are considered normal life activities and labor, and on what the medical establishment deems to be within normal physical or intellectual parameters respectively. On the other hand, the definition is aware of the social construction of disability, represented in part C, which can account for discrimination that is based on people’s perception of limitations, even if no such limitation actually exists”.⁶ Modern legal documents thus offer a broad, general, normative definition of disability, although its boundaries are fluid and prone to stereotyping.⁷ Among different modern definitions of disability, Steven D. Edwards’ assertion matches early modern reality well: “disability is both a relational concept and a value-laden concept, implying a failure to match the competence and capabilities of bodies deemed ‘normal’”.⁸ Using early modern egodocuments, Bianca Frohne and Klaus-Peter Horn have concluded that the early modern status of being disabled presented both a medical and a social challenge whereby “neither physical nor mental afflictions absolved the person in question and his or her family from the responsibility of finding individually tailored ways of providing for him or her”.⁹ Interwoven with the concept of disability as an inability to perform functions deemed ‘normal’ from the standpoint of corporeal and social factors is the concept of ‘deformity’ which, as David M. Turner and other scholars point out, is an aesthetic category, describing a failure to comply with a body which is considered visually ‘standard’, a “deviation from normal appearance”.¹⁰ Finally, it must be noted that in early modern Europe, impairments associated with old age—which typically call for medical intervention today—were considered natural changes and did not stigmatise the affected individual nor their family the way in which congenital impairments did. This does not mean that such impairments were not at times a source of suffering: at the age of 74, Maria de Neufville (1699–1779) from Amsterdam complained in her diary about the progressive loss of vision that amplified her unhappiness and—as far as one can deduce from her story—her decades-long depression.¹¹

While social and medical constructions of disability differed considerably in the early modern period and no equivalent of the word ‘disability’ existed, we can recover other specific terms used at the time. Late medieval and Renaissance sources, including early vernacular translations of the Bible, repeatedly use the words ‘cripple’, ‘lame’, ‘leper’, and ‘deaf and dumb’ which, however discriminatory, can still be found on many museum labels. We can find copious examples of this crude language in The Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, first published in Dutch by Jan de Laet in Antwerp under the title Der fielen, rabauwen, oft der schalcken vocabulaer (1563). Crucially, The Book of Vagabonds reveals how deeply this vocabulary was tied to the attitudes towards disabled members of society and the suspicions surrounding them, and later in this chapter, we shall see how the oppressive power of this language continues to shape approaches to physical and sensory difference. The anonymous author of the book distinguishes between several categories of beggars, each with a specific name such as “cripples” (clinckeneeren), “strollers” (vagieren), “false begging priests” (schlepperen), “spurious beggars” (momsen), and “pretended lepers” (jonffrouwen, a term which in and of itself sounds neutral, but which takes on a wholly different meaning when read in the context of the short chapter in which it appears).¹² Each group described in Der fielen has a different way of ‘cheating the mankind’, either by feigning their impairment or lying about how they have become disabled. The ultimate purpose of the booklet was to inform honest citizens about the means of deception used by beggars. This association of blindness and mobility impairments with deceit serves also as the fundamental premise of a vernacular table-play that would have been performed at a private house—Twee Rabbouwen (Two Thieves), written around 1599. The play’s protagonists pretends to be “a crippled man leading a blind man” in order to live a life of idleness by trying to extort alms from hardworking burghers.¹³

Distribution and Functions of Paintings in Domestic Spaces

The crude vocabulary and the persistent suspicion that people who displayed their infirmities in public were faking them match the genre iconography of disability that we find in Netherlandish homes. However, before we look at examples of such works, alongside the generally more positive representation of bodily difference in religious artworks, a few comments on early modern dwellings and their decoration are necessary. The boundaries between private and public spaces in a Renaissance home were much more porous than in a modern one. In the southern Netherlands in the sixteenth-century (with which much of this section is concerned), the centre of an upper-class house was called a neercamer (often, we encounter both a small and a large neercamer in the same house). The space was used by the family both for personal use as well as to entertain guests, although in the mid-sixteenth century, a separate dining hall (eetkamer) began to emerge in the dwellings of the elite. The semi-private/semi-public character of the domestic space did not preclude the owner’s control over who was admitted and where. Although the dual function of an entrepreneur’s house as a private residence and a place where one conducted business must have necessarily meant admitting some unwelcome associates and customers into one’s home, such visits could have been limited to the voorcamer aen de straete (winckel), the room which was entered directly from the street and which served as the office.¹⁴

Michaël Green has attributed the emergence of a new house layout in the seventeenth century—one that allowed family members greater privacy—to Simon Stevin’s (1548–1620) unfinished treatise De Huysbou.¹⁵ However, there was an older architectural book immensely popular in sixteenth-century Antwerp that gives us an idea of how an upper-class residence (albeit a suburban one) would have been designed. In 1565, Christophe Plantin (1520–1589) published Charles Estienne’s (Dutch: Kaerl Stevens, 1504–1564) Dutch paraphrase of his L’agriculture et maison rustique, De Landtwinninge ende Hoeve which proposed that the central space of a suburban villa should consist of a kitchen and a dining room connected to a basement used for storing locally grown food and wine. According to Estienne’s recommendation, the residence should also include guest rooms, while the family’s living quarters should be separated from those more public spaces.¹⁶ The book became an instant bestseller which strongly suggests that Estienne’s guidelines must have matched the preferences of wealthy homeowners.

Some elite early modern houses—like the famous Hof van Busleyden in Mechelen, the residence of the founder of Leuven’s Collegium Trilingue, Jeroen van Busleyden (ca. 1470–1517)—had a separate stoove, a small room next to the dining room. The stoove—into which van Busleyden invited only his closest and most esteemed guests—was used for conversations rather than as a personal retreat. Its significance lies not only in the list of esteemed guests—including Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) and Thomas More (1478–1535)—who spent their time there, but also in its decoration.¹⁷ Hof van Busleyden’s stoove was embellished with wall paintings whose subjects combined mythological and biblical banquets (the feast of Balthazar, the feast and punishment of Tantalus), classical exempla of virtue and warnings against hubris (the Roman hero Mucius Scaevola, the fall of Phaeton), and other themes that simultaneously encouraged an atmosphere of friendly discussion as well as provided pleasant ornamental background while bolstering the social status of the host (the Muses, Venus and Diana, Busleyden’s coat-of-arms). The stoove has been open to visitors since 2018, and although only fragments of the wall paintings have survived, it still approximates the experience of conversations that must have taken place there. The stoove can only be entered from a large and lavish dining hall, with the entrance located at its end. The spatial layout itself thus determines the temporal sequence of a dinner party. It is a small space: it would have seated perhaps a dozen guests (most likely fewer) and its size would have helped to create an ambience of intimate friendship while bringing the interlocutors in proximity with the pictorial decoration.

That the stoove’s decoration and conversations that took place there left a deep impression on Busleyden’s guests is confirmed by Thomas More’s poems praising the residence. Hof van Busleyden also served as one of the models for Erasmus’s Convivium Religiosum (The Godly Feast). In the colloquy, written around 1520, guests (all married laymen) gather for a luncheon at a suburban villa. They discuss scriptural excerpts, walk in the gardens, and admire secular and religious paintings decorating the house of their host, Eusebius. Wandering through galleries above the loggias adorned with paintings of the life of Christ and typological scenes from the Old Testament, Eusebius tells his guests, “Here I stroll sometimes, conversing with myself and meditating upon that inexpressible purpose of God by which he willed to restore the human race through his Son. Sometimes my wife, or a friend pleased by sacred subjects, keeps me company”.¹⁸

Erasmus’s colloquy and the history of Busleyden’s stoove, together with other pictorial cycles that I discuss elsewhere, register three important features of domestic decoration in sixteenth-century Netherlands.¹⁹ First, paintings on display were anything but silent backdrops, actively stimulating the conversations of both family and guest. Second, the subject of those paintings was often biblical, encouraging an everyday engagement with religious stories as well as the cultivation of the ethos of a good Christian household. Finally, they were crucial instruments of fashioning the identity of one’s family, both shaping their members’ virtues and their performance before the outside world. All these factors play a role in how we should understand the representation of disabled bodies in domestic spaces.

The Disabled ‘Other’ in Netherlandish Art Placed in Domestic Space

One of the most famous painters of complex discursive images that could spark a discussion among family members and their guests—what art historians have come to call ‘conversation pieces’—was Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525/30–1569). Around 1559–60, Bruegel completed three paintings identical in size and compositional approach: Netherlandish Proverbs, Children’s Games, and The Fight between Carnival and Lent. Although there is no documentation of the patronage of these three paintings, formal similarities among them and their complementary subjects leave little doubt that they were commissioned as a set. These three busy ethnographic images, lacking a singular compositional focus and offering multiple scenes instead, engage the viewer in an open-ended, multivalent reading. They thus invite an experience akin to browsing through a commonplace book, a collection of adages, or surveying a kunstkammer.²⁰ As scholars over the past two decades have repeatedly shown, Bruegel’s paintings were almost exclusively collected by wealthy Antwerp entrepreneurs, the most famous among them being the tax collector Niclaes Jonghelinck (1517–1570) and the Master of the Antwerp Mint, Jan Noirot (1530–after 1580). In the words of Amy Orrock, “Bruegel’s paintings would therefore have been enjoyed communally and by invitation only”.²¹ They were scrutinised by members of the financial elite, people for whom the economic prosperity and social harmony of their city were of great importance.

This is an important context for the reception of The Fight between Carnival and Lent which concerns us here because of its inclusion of persons with physical impairments (Fig. 6.1). The setting is an urban square which strengthens its relevance for city dwellers. Among the various customs of the seasons of Lent and Carnival, we find several figures of disabled beggars and generous almsgivers, possibly moved to charity by the Lenten call to repentance. While there are no beggars in front of the church on the right-hand side—their absence belies a stereotypical notion we find in contemporary literature—two figures receive alms from a well-dressed man at some distance from the church. We initially recognise them as blind because a dog accompanies them, but upon closer scrutiny, we realise that one of the men has no eye sockets while the other man’s eyes are shut. Next to this couple is a man with missing limbs, introduced to passer-by by a woman with pilgrim’s badges on her hat. This man also receives alms from one of the wealthier citizens. Finally, across from the figures with sensory and physical impairments, we find a family with a small child, likewise receiving money. Although these three small groups seem to belong to the category of the so-called ‘deserving poor’—that is, people who fell into dire poverty because of some misfortune but who were honest and worthy of public assistance—the case is more complicated. The child in the lower right corner is accompanied by both parents rather than only her mother whereas, per imperial orders, such a family would not have been allowed to ask for money in the streets. Moreover, neither of the two parents appears to be disabled. Around the time when Bruegel finished this composition, Antwerp had strict regulations against begging. Unless one was a leper or a member of a mendicant order, they could not beg; transgressions would be met with corporal punishment and a short jail sentence.²² Even more suspicious, especially in the context of the religious subject of the panel, is the woman wearing pilgrim’s badges, carrying on her back a woven basket with a small child inside and pointing towards the man with a mobility impairment.

Fig. 6.1

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559, oil on panel, 118 × 163.7 cm. Courtesy: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The accumulation of these motifs taps into many of the anxieties surrounding paupers in the mid-sixteenth century. First, viewers might have wondered whether the woman was a ‘false pilgrim’, someone who has stolen badges and has only pretended to have visited various pilgrimage sites, counting on the traditional Christian charity shown to pilgrims. Second, the small child in the basket recalls complaints in the so-called ‘beggar literature’ about ‘lazy’ parents who taught their children the beggar’s trade from infancy and sometimes even kidnapped other people’s children and harmed them in order to make them look more pitiful.²³ Finally, there is the disabled man on the ground. His impairment seems genuine as he presents his legs and left arm to passers-by. On the one hand, this ostentatious presentation of the missing limbs proactively precludes any suspicion that the man feigns his disability; on the other hand (as I shall discuss later), it echoes the frequent complaints about repulsive beggars presenting their sores and impairments in public spaces contained in sixteenth-century Netherlandish literature and city ordinances.

Antwerp, for whose burghers Bruegel painted, was a city of stark contrasts where exorbitantly wealthy entrepreneurs lived side by side with populations impoverished due to the rapid urbanisation, rising prices, and new taxes. The city also attracted so-called hired hands—that is, tradesmen who were not guild members and therefore could not rely on the support provided by guilds in the time of illness or impairment. At the same time, public spectacles, prognostications, vernacular poetry, and sermons repeatedly reminded Antwerp citizens about the necessity of showing charity to those in need. The original viewers of The Fight between Carnival and Lent would have been the primary addressees of this message, and the equivocal nature of the almsgiving scenes in Bruegel’s painting would have invited them to discuss the nature and limits of charity. The placement of all the almsgivers in relative proximity to the church also raises questions about their motives: are they concerned about their community or their own salvation? Bruegel seems to be suggesting the latter to be true. To the left, in the middle ground and far from the church, we find six men with mobility impairments, four of whom strongly resemble the group portrayed in Bruegel’s painting of The Beggars (1568), now in the Louvre Museum (Fig. 6.2). These men are wholly abandoned and no one pays any attention to them, a fact which strengthens the idea that the right-hand-side almsgivers are primarily motivated by the promise of heavenly reward and their charitable behaviour is a part of the Catholic apparatus of seasonal repentance. In contrast, in the world of Carnival pleasures, no one is concerned with the fate of those living on the fringes of society. These two portrayals of people with disabilities provide two alternative answers to the question about the role of charity in sixteenth-century society. In doing so, Bruegel replicates the strategy of vernacular theatrical plays written and performed by rhetoricians (amateur poetry and theatrical organisations) which typically posed a question at the beginning of the play and presented multiple answers to ultimately reveal the ‘correct’ solution at the end.²⁴ Here, viewers need to come to their own conclusions by looking at the painting and discussing it with their company. The open-endedness of Bruegel’s compositions was what drew elite viewers to them and enabled an experience summarised by Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–1592) dictum that “[t]here is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees”.²⁵

Fig. 6.2

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Beggars, 1568, oil on panel, 18.5 × 21.5 cm. Scala/Art Resource, NY

To better understand how a conversation sparked by The Fight between Carnival and Lent might have looked, it will be helpful to pair this panel with another image. The Fight between Carnival and Lent shares the quality of a visual collection with the print published in Antwerp around 1570 by Hieronymus Cock (1518–1570), known as Cripples or The Crippled Bishop (Fig. 6.3). The engraving has been associated with two drawings—one in the Albertina, Vienna and one in the Royal Library in Brussels.²⁶ Each completed by a different artist, the drawings present a more detailed depiction of various mobility and visual impairments than the print. As confirmed by the small circles made with a dark crayon above many of the figures, the drawings were used as pattern sheets, providing painters with examples of disabled figures for their images.²⁷ In a crucial departure from the two drawings, Cock added to the print the following verses: “All who would gladly live by the blue beggar’s sack/Go mostly as cripples”. In Netherlandish popular culture, blue was the colour of deceit. The inscription verbalises the common sentiment that beggars with visible impairments were lazy cheats, faking their impairment to extort alms from wealthy burghers and avoiding making a living through honest labour. Cock’s print had a much broader viewership than Bruegel’s paintings and its copies were owned by non-elite, ‘middle-class’ viewers.

Fig. 6.3

Anonymous after a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, Cripples, ca. 1570, engraving, 30.3 × 21.9 cm. Courtesy: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

How, then, would these viewers have approached this collection of figures suspended in the void of the white sheet? The print can be ascribed a cognitive and didactic value. It is a symptom of the sixteenth-century culture of collecting, marked by a compulsive need to bring various “‘things’ of the world” together.²⁸ Scientific and cultural artefacts, natural marvels, and other specimens instilled wonder and an array of different emotions in their viewers—from curiosity through awe to fear and disgust. By transporting several beggars displaying their impairments from the street on to paper, Cock amplified the revulsion associated with ‘abject’ paupers while allowing his viewers to see them in a somewhat sterile manner, without the need for an immediate reaction. Disabled paupers occupying public spaces had been described as abiectus since the late Middle Ages,²⁹ and Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) considered their presence disturbing enough to propose in his On Assistance to the Poor (De Subventione Pauperum, 1526) several solutions to removing them from the streets. Such actions, Vives asserts, would make it “safer, healthier, and pleasanter to attend churches and to dwell in the city. The hideousness of ulcers and diseases will no longer be imposed on the general viewing, eliminating a spectacle revolting to nature and even to the most humane and compassionate mind”.³⁰ Incidentally, Vives’ proposals are almost identical with the so-called ‘ugly laws’ that were in place in many American cities between 1867 and 1974 and which banned physically disabled people from public spaces. Viewers of Cock’s print would have experienced disgust and fear, but their reactions would not have stopped there. Early modern collections were always meant to have a pragmatic function and produce new knowledge, especially knowledge that worked in the service of the community’s good. Can we imagine an owner pondering over this print or drawing, trying to identify whose impairment was genuine and whose was feigned, which one was a result of immoral, dissolute life, and which of innocent, inescapable misfortune? The image distils a contemporary paradox surrounding beggars: to be considered deserving of charity, paupers needed to display their impaired or diseased bodies, but these, in turn, made them abject.

Although we have to rely on circumstantial evidence for much of our reconstruction of private conversations on disability, in one case, we know precisely how a Renaissance viewer reacted to one of Bruegel’s paintings. An early owner of Bruegel’s Beggars attached a note in Latin to the reverse of the painting: “Here Nature, transformed in painted images and seen in her cripples, is amazed to see that Bruegel is her peer”. The response is striking: it focuses on the artistic qualities of the composition—more specifically, on the classical topos of art as imitation of nature. With inimitable virtuosity, Bruegel achieved the most important goal of visual art and deceived nature in such a way that his creative powers equalled hers. As a result, Bruegel’s disabled protagonists become a token within humanist art theory, and the owner’s learned response exposes an existential social gap between him and the figures depicted in his work. However, the commentary also recognises mobility impairment as “natural” (“Nature … seen in her cripples”): on the one hand, such an assessment helps to reject the then-commonplace notion of disability as divine retribution, but on the other, there is a suggestion here that physical, visible impairment is a deformation and a deviation from the normative body. A disabled body is a form of an abject curiosity and, as such, is a fascinating subject for an innovative artist such as Pieter Bruegel.

Indeed, at a time when the medical and civic vocabulary of disability was vague, crude, and discriminatory, artists such as Bruegel created convincing naturalistic portrayals of sensory and mobility impairments. This is particularly true of another late painting by the artist, The Parable of the Blind (1568). The subject would have been well-known to mid-sixteenth-century Netherlandish viewers, with numerous engravings portraying this parable. Although first documented as part of the collection of Giambattista Masi of Parma (ca. 1575–1611), requisitioned in 1611 by Ranuccio Farnese (1569–1622), The Parable of the Blind was likely painted for a Netherlandish patron, perhaps for a suburban villa outside Brussels, the city in which Bruegel lived at the time.³¹ Christ’s words on which the composition is based—“Let them alone: they are blind, and leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit” (Matthew 15:14. See also: Luke 6:39)—is a metaphor for blindness caused by self-righteousness and false confidence.³² However, as Walter Gibson has argued, Bruegel’s extremely detailed portrayal of ophthalmological conditions transcends the didacticism of the biblical parable.³³ Bruegel’s painting offers its viewers a captivating paradox by inviting them to scrutinise the very detailed depiction of various conditions that cause blindness—that is, conditions that would prevent such scrutiny. The image thus re-creates the dynamic between the non-disabled sixteenth-century burghers who would have been its primary viewers and the impoverished, vagrant blind men it depicts. This act of recognising their privilege would have engaged the empathy of the original viewers and perhaps would have served as the ultimate call to charity. The six blind men wander through the countryside, away from the village in the background. In mid-sixteenth-century Netherlandish literature, wealthy, industrious burghers sometimes entertained the fantasy of carefree life. In the Beggar Talk (Ptochología, 1524), Erasmus likewise projects such a fantasy by having one of the mendicants explain that theirs is the best kind of life since no one investigates them and they are completely free.³⁴ Not surprisingly, the departure of the painting’s protagonists from the village together with the church towering over the landscape between the second and the third man have often been interpreted as an embodiment of this fantasy: a rejection of the true faith and the constraints of an orderly society. However, with its uncanny naturalism, The Parable of the Blind is in fact a depiction of sixteenth-century reality in which there were few institutions to support persons with chronic illness and disability. Rather than encouraging the fantasy of a carefree life, Bruegel’s painting exposes elite viewers to the reality of the lives of disabled and impoverished persons.

Early modern artists were, of course, primarily concerned with the marketability of their works and meeting patrons’ expectations rather than social justice and the “repression of outcasts”.³⁵ Nonetheless, it was in the sixteenth century that the presence of disabled beggars was first approached as a social concern rather than a religious consideration. It was also at that time that vernacular theatrical plays, poems, and prognostications performed and published in the urban centres of northern Europe began to stress the importance of charity as social virtue essential for the well-being of the community.³⁶ Bruegel’s interest in disabled paupers in The Parable of the Blind and The Fight between Carnival and Lent suggests the necessity for a transition towards this new understanding of charity as a pragmatic social virtue whose cultivation benefits the entire community.

Impaired Family Members in Early Modern Households

Inspired by a well-known biblical passage, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Parable of the Blind crossed boundaries between genre and religious iconography. However, the most common context for early modern depictions of people with disabilities were images of miraculous healing based on New Testament stories.³⁷ These paintings and prints presented idealised visions of impaired supplicants seeking deliverance from their suffering—a deliverance that would not only remove the impairment and restore health to their bodies but also enable their full participation in the social and religious lives of their communities. In other words, images of miraculous healing capture both the deliverance from a bodily ‘defect’ and from social marginalisation. In contrast to what we may expect, those paintings were typically displayed in private houses rather than hospitals or alms-houses, and in the rare cases in which we find such images in the inventories of charity institutions, they were hung in spaces intended for their regents rather than the inmates. The preferred location of images of miraculous healing can be explained by the patterns of care in the early modern period: a reasonably well-to-do person would never seek treatment at a hospital, nor would a hospital admit a person with a chronic disease or impairment. Thus, it would have been common for families to care for a frail or an impaired relative, and such biblical imagery provided them with models of compassionate behaviour. It should be noted here that while compassion is now commonly associated with condescending pity within the context of disability, to apply this definition to early modern societies would be misguided. Compassion and charity were understood as actionable virtues that required one to assist those in need and—in the context of sixteenth-century households—encouraged the kind of caregiving and intimate concern that we may recognise as familiar.³⁸

Much like today, as their primary caregivers, parents of children with mobility and sensory impairments were worried about their children’s day-to-day life, especially in the event of their death. The mother of Hendrick Avercamp (1585–1634), a deaf Dutch painter best known for his winter landscapes, requested that her son should be permitted an annual allowance that would be paid by herself since he could not live off the portion of her estate. His mother worried that if he was not provided with such an allowance, he would “become a burden to others”.³⁹ For middle-class (such as merchant) and elite families, physical and mental afflictions posed further challenges, since conditions such as congenital deafness precluded early modern men from inheriting the estate (the likely reason behind Avercamp’s mother’s petition) and impeded their participation in family business.

Parents also expressed concern about their children’s suffering, even acknowledging that their search for a cure might have contributed to it. This experience transcended chronological and geographical boundaries and has been commented upon by parents and children alike. In 1564, the German merchant and Nuremberg council member, Endres Imhoff (1491–1579) remarked on the death of his 31-year-old disabled son: “He did not live through many healthy days, was in great pain and did suffer much, especially due to the many cures we tried on him”,⁴⁰ and the sixteenth-century deaf shoemaker Sebastian Fischer (1513–?) complained in his diary about painful therapies on which his family insisted and which only worsened his hearing.⁴¹ Over 500 years later, Jaipreet Virdi, who lost her hearing at the age of four after a severe case of meningitis that was diagnosed too late, commented on her family’s efforts to find a cure for her deafness as painful, isolating, and incomprehensible at her young age.⁴² Such responses to disability and chronic disease are aptly summarised in the title of Liz Moore’s essay “I’m Tired of Chasing a Cure”.⁴³

Early modern parents were also worried about their children’s salvation. Sight and hearing were defined as instrumental senses for one’s faith by the Catholic and Protestant Churches, respectively. Congenitally deaf children were for a long time considered beyond salvation, something which must have been a heavy burden for their parents. In the late 1680s, Johann Conrad Amman (1669–1724), a Swiss doctor who worked in Amsterdam and studied in Leiden, was hired as a teacher to a prelingually deaf girl, Esther Koolaert (ca. 1684–1737). When Amman published a treatise entitled The Talking Deaf Man (Surdus Loquens) in 1692 in which he explained his didactic methods, he underlined that Esther could not only converse with others but also gained access to faith and salvation.⁴⁴ Concerns about deaf persons’ redemption and the ensuing social stigma were also proactively countered in family chronicles. A seventeenth-century portrait painter active in Friesland and Groningen, Jan Jansz de Stomme (“the Mute”; 1615–1658) was said to have discussed sophisticated theological problems with his wife and a servant using sign language.⁴⁵ While this assertion may at first strike us as apocryphal, given that a formalised, complex sign language did not exist yet in the Dutch Republic, it likely contains a grain of truth, since seventeenth-century authors such as Michel de Montaigne observed that “[o]ur mutes dispute, argue, and tell stories by signs. I have seen some so supple and versed in this, that in truth they lacked nothing of perfection in being able to make themselves understood”.⁴⁶ Physical blindness, besides precluding one from partaking in iconic devotions of the Roman Catholic Church, could have been interpreted as a metaphor for spiritual blindness.⁴⁷ The Judaeo-Christian tradition of linking disease and disability to sin meant that a child’s impairment was a matter of the whole family’s salvation and social status.⁴⁸

Parental sociomedical and religious responses to their child’s condition differed considerably. In medieval and early modern Spain, where congenital deafness—a hereditary condition—was common among aristocratic families, deaf children were placed in convents, away from the prying public eye but also amidst a community that provided physical and spiritual assistance.⁴⁹ Parents could also take the child to a wonder-working shrine⁵⁰ or secure more immediate means of enabling not only their child’s comfort but also his or her salvation. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, a couple from Mechelen, Jacob Van den Putte and Margaretha Svos, commissioned a besloten hofje (an enclosed garden), a type of multimedia altarpiece that also included a depiction of the spouses and their visually impaired daughter, the Augustinian nun Maria Van den Putte. As Andrea Pearson has compellingly argued, the besloten hofje was linked to the parent’s donation to the Order that accepted their daughter even though she could not participate in the caregiving duties of the sisters in the hospital (gasthuis) which they oversaw. It was also, Pearson elaborates, an object that—thanks to its multisensory design—facilitated Maria’s devotional experience.⁵¹ Hofjes consisted of intricate floral decorations made from paper, silk, and wire and included relics—the ultimate healing instruments of the Catholic Church. The hofje stimulated a tactile devotion that compensated for Maria’s lack of visual access to the Catholic devotional apparatus. At the same time, the depiction of Maria and her parents on the wings presented them as “ideal supplicants”. Jacob and Margaretha were introduced as offering a “charitable spiritual provision” on behalf of their daughter, and Maria was shown “as a spiritually abled if not a visually abled member of the hospital community, one who is deserving of profession and redemption”.⁵²

Maria Van den Putte’s case in particular shows that if parents strove for the impaired child’s removal from the public eye and restricted social integration, it was because an impaired child put the entire family at the risk of marginalisation. Such efforts also indicate that while it would have been common for early modern families to care for a disabled or chronically ill relative, the prevalence of such care did not remove the stigmatising connection between sin and disease. The opportunity to conceal one’s impairment, or an impairment of a family member, was a social and a religious—even a salvific—privilege. Images of the disabled ‘Other’ displayed in the domestic space bolstered this agenda: they served to distinguish impaired and possibly dishonest paupers encountered in the streets from middle-and upper-class persons with disabilities. Genre paintings, prints, books, and plays surveyed earlier in this chapter brought the experience from the public space of Netherlandish cities into a private, controlled setting, facilitating a conversation that framed disability (and poverty) as a communal challenge and detached it from the experience of well-to-do disabled persons and their guardians who looked at stories of miraculous healing as models of compassion.

How We Talk About Disability: Ableist Language Then and Now

Early modern societies—not unlike our own—cultivated a bifurcated view of disability in which anonymous disabled paupers encountered in the streets engendered hostility and disgust, while a loved one’s impairment precipitated the concern for his or her well-being, salvation, and cure. Renaissance houses, with their porous boundaries between the private and the public spheres, functioned as primary spaces in which societies negotiated their understanding of disability through its textual and visual representations. However, except for rare cases (such as Imhoff’s and Fischer’s stories, which did not circulate broadly), it was an abstracted version of disability constructed by non-disabled people. In contrast to first-person twenty-first-century narratives, they tell us little about the actual experience of disability and did not present relatable models for people who lived with them. At most, images of biblical healing miracles would have provided people with disabilities with idealised—and unattainable—examples of piety that made one worthy of healing.⁵³

However, at least one aspect of these early modern representations of disability and conversations perpetuated by them provides an important insight into our own conversations about bodily difference. While reading The Book of Vagabonds and looking at The Crippled Bishop, we immediately and instinctively identify the discrimination and contempt at the centre of these works and reflexively try to sanitise their language and the language that has been used to discuss them for centuries. We cringe when Erasmus of Rotterdam uses in his colloquies sayings such as “You’re no different than a crippled cobbler, forever sitting at home” and when he describes one of the protagonists of Patterns of Informal Conversations as “[a] chatterbox. A bit deaf but by no means dumb”.⁵⁴ However, in our quest to anachronistically sanitise and ultimately erase the vocabulary of early modern disability, we risk overlooking that our own manner of everyday speech reflects centuries-old prejudices. The often seemingly innocuous ways in which we employ various words and sayings grounded in language around disability have continued to foster marginalisation of persons with disabilities and erase the lived experience of disability. Many languages have preserved the suspicion towards persons with mobility impairments in common proverbs. In German, Polish, Italian, and Czech, to name just a few, one often says that ‘lies have short legs’ (‘Lügen haben kurze Beine’, ‘Kłamstwo ma krótkie nogi’, ‘Le bugie hanno le gambe corte’, and ‘Lež má krátké nohy’), with an even more derogatory variation in Spanish: ‘la mentira tiene cortas patas’ (patas describes the legs of animals or inanimate objects, as opposed to piernas, which describes human legs.) Similarly, the English proverb ‘he hasn’t got a leg to stand on’ indicates how the truth or evidence does not support one’s position; in fact, the proverb is usually abbreviated into the adverb ‘legless’, synonymous with ‘baseless’. Dutch has a proverb ‘de leugen gaat op krukken’, which literally means ‘lies walk on crutches’, where kruk can mean both a ‘crutch’ and a ‘crook’. In Italian, instead of saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’, one says ‘chi va con lo zoppo impara a zoppicare’, that is, ‘those who go with the lame learn to limp’, which captures the common late medieval and early modern notion that beggars would often form dangerous groups. It also corresponds to the stereotype that feigning a mobility impairment is a trade which lazy vagabond parents teach their children. In the light of these examples, one of the valuable lessons that we can learn from early modern conversations on disability is to become more conscientious and informed about our own word choices, beyond the obviously problematic and ableist terms such as ‘lame’, ‘cripple’, and ‘deaf and dumb’. While acknowledging the impact that biases around disability have had on our language systems cannot replace systemic social changes, it is a good place from which to start our reconceptualisation of disability in the public and private spheres.