The Names of Physical Deformity: A Meditation on the Term Disability and Its Recent Uses

Abstract

Disability is an umbrella term used to refer to a variety of conditions that result in forms of disenfranchisement or social exclusion on the basis of some assumption understood when labeled as defective or pathological. People we would now label as disabled have lived well prior to modernity, and the use of this category distorts the experience of people who had their own ways of addressing physical deformity without the language of disability being applied to that experience. This essay explores the use of the term “disability” when applied to people who lived in the sixteenth century and the ways it can distort their lived experience. This essay draws on some of the jesters portrayed by Velazquez, as well as the notion of monster.

Mucho es lo que tienen en común los monstruos y esos seres efímeros y espectrales que habitan en los espejos. Tanto unos como otros son escurridizos e imposibles de fijar” Luis Peñalver De soslayo: una mirada sobre los bufones de Velázquez.

1 Introduction

Disability is commonly used to refer to a wide array of physical impairments, either congenital or acquired, that impair typical physical or intellectual development. The person’s ability to live independently and to fully participate in social life can ultimately be affected. As such, it is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of conditions ranging from organic disorders to individual personality disorders that have been identified as deviations from the norm. The term “disability” was coined early in the nineteenth century to address the predicament of the war veteran that came back mutilated from the battlefront. It was also readily applied to polio survivors in this same period, and to children with developmental disorders such as CP or Down Syndrome, who were also known by other names such as spastics and retarded. The recent interest in disabilities in the humanities (disability studies) and social sciences has led to speculation about applying the term to people with different embodiments who lived prior to the nineteenth century. An example of this is the recent “Mujeres con discapacidad” [Women With Disabilities], edited by Maria Ángeles Cózar in 2011, in which she includes, under the rubric of disabled people, Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, the Duchess of Pastrana and an active schemer in the Court of Philip the Second (sixteenth century) (Cózar Gutiérrez 2011). Much earlier, and undisputedly one of the best studies on corporal difference in the humanities, is the work of Henri-Jacques Stiker (1982), Corps infirmes et sociétés, which has been translated into English under the title A History of Disability.

Stiker contends in this book that a society’s attitude to people with different embodiments attests to its capacity for inclusion relative to diversity. Stiker’s neat use of the term disability within the frameworks of the late nineteenth through to the early twentieth century did not prevent the English version, which outsold the original, from carrying the word Disability in the title.

My purpose in this chapter is to reflect on the use of the word disability among people who lived prior to the nineteenth century. I suggest that using this term to define people with non-normative embodiment who lived in earlier times which characterized difference with its own distinct description distorts the experiences lived by these individuals and conceals the contemporary nature of the cultural patterns we use to make sense of body difference.

With the aim of casting doubt on the use of disability to describe the people who lived in the inceptions of modernity (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), I will devote the first section to the notion of monster, which at the time was the most consistently used category to address anatomical deformity. In the second section, I will focus on the Court Jester with the aim of exploring a unique cultural location for body difference in sixteenth-century Spain, so as to explore the ways in which a category devised to address social oppression in the twentieth century misleads the cultural reality of body difference in the Baroque period. This is due to convenience and personal inclination, as the Spanish Courts were one of the few places where records of people were kept. From an anthropological standpoint, exploring jesters necessitates a return to Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Michel Foucault’s historicism to guide our reflection.

2 Between the Horrific and the Hilarious: Physical Deformity from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries

It was in the year 1496, when a scale-covered human-like creature with the head of an ass was spotted on the banks of Tiber River, near Rome. The event was recounted by Philip Melanchton and Martin Luther in 1523 in a famous pamphlet. The two Reformers considered such a creature to be an unequivocal admonition of the impending Apocalypse as described by Daniel, who included political satire in his account. According to Davidson (1991):

… the pope-ass, according to Melanchton, is the image of the Church of Rome; and just as it is awful that a human body should have the head of an ass, so it is likewise horrible that the Bishop of Rome should be the head of the Church (37–38).

Closely related to hurricanes and storms, monsters encompassed a broad category that included fantastic creatures from medieval bestiaries and travel logs, which in the fifteenth century still belonged to the realm of prodigy (Daston and Park 1998).

What was completely new was the fact that the Ass-Pope became an issue under scientific consideration, something which was previously unheard of, as Martin Luther noted in a letter dated 1523. Prodigies of nature had been considered divine admonitions by both Protestants and Catholics, who took them as warning signs to take sides in the European religious wars. The radical novelty of the pamphlet was that the appearance of the Ass-Pope was deemed to be a reaction against the abominations of Papacy (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1

The Ass-Pope. Martin Luther (1523). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bapstesel.png

At the end of the sixteenth century¹, eschatological explanations did in fact coexist with nascent scientific or proto-scientific reflection on the origin of monstrosity. In 1575, Catholic surgeon Ambroise Paré (1571/1982), regarded monsters as a result of the “Wrath of God” (Paré 1571/1982, p. 5).

Thus it is understood that blindness serves no purpose other than to testify to the power of Christ through miraculous cures, as is narrated in the Gospel According to John, or that “demons find a thousand ways to transform themselves into different creatures and get inside men, especially into a woman’s womb, giving rise to monstrosities” (Paré 1571/1982, pp. 4–5). Nevertheless, and despite admitting that such apparitions always foretold disastrous events, Paré introduced an important distinction between these creatures. On one side were the prodigies, “things opposing the natural order, such as when a woman gives birth to a snake or a dog” (Paré 1571/1982, p. 2) and monsters, “things which appear to be outside the natural order” (Paré 1571/1982, p. 2), such as the birth of “a baby with two heads or with more or fewer limbs than normal,” which is possible in the natural world (Paré 1571/1982, p. 3). Paré distinguished 13 causes, of which at least ten were “natural” and could be grouped into three categories. The first was that relating to excess or defect, and this included Siamese twins, multiple births in general, and polydactylism, all these being considered the result of an excess of seed. Secondly was the lack of or malformation of one or various limbs, known today as amelia or phocomelia, attributed in this case to insufficient seed. Finally, there are those who, due to the mother having adopted indecorous postures or having been exposed to blows or unpleasant emotional impressions, were born hunchbacked, with inverted legs, or, in the case of a mother with a particularly feverish imagination, with hair all over their face (Paré 1571/1982, p. 5). It is worth noting that while Paré was already pointing out some causes which are today well recognized by modern medicine, such as hereditary diseases, or infections during pregnancy, the concern about the theological significance of such malformations still lived side by side with his proto-scientific attitude (Paré 1571/1982, p. 85) (Fig. 8.2).

Fig. 8.2

Prodigies and Monsters. Ambroise Paré (1571). Source: BIU Santé (Paris). http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histoire/images/?cote=009830

Shortly after Ambroise Paré wrote On Monsters and Marvels, Philip the Second wrote to his daughters from Lisbon:

Madalena is feeling very lonely today, since her son-in-law left, although I think she does it out of compliance. And she was very angry with me for taking her to task over some things she had done in Bethlehem and in the galleys. And with Luis she was very bad tempered for the same thing² (Moreno Villa 1939, p. 25).

Madalena Ruiz served in Felipe II’s court from 1568 to 1605 [Illustration 3], and according to Moreno Villa “was fond of bullfighting, dance and liquor” (Moreno Villa 1939, p. 141). The detailed chronicle of the intrigues between a servant of the King’s Palace and a jester serving daughter Isabel Clara Eugenia, written by the Holy Emperor, comes as a surprise. Unlike Germany, where people with physical abnormalities would occasion passionate debates on creation and the legitimacy of the Pope, in the Spanish court of the Habsburgs they were involved in the pleasant domesticity of the Royal Palace. It has been estimated that the Habsburg dynasty had a total of 201 dwarfs at court, which amounts to one per year of rule since Carlos V became the Holy Roman Emperor (Moreno Villa 1939).

It is clear that Madalena Ruiz, Nicolaso Pertusato, or Mari Bárbola (the two dwarfs that appear in The Meninas) would now be regarded as disabled, yet they belonged to the court precisely because of their corporeal form. We wonder, then, if the category of disability, coined in the nineteenth century, can accurately be applied to people who lived in the sixteenth century or to mythological characters. My point is that while people whose physical impairments would qualify them as disabled have always existed, extending this category to the past may not be justified.

Dwarfs looked after children, kept the Maid’s honor safe until marriage, and took care of administration, but their main function was to be decorative: their main task was to amuse (Bernand 2001, p. 121). Having a fool, a buffoon, man of amusement, or a dwarf “is like having ripples in a stone doorway or in one’s hair, on a coat of arms or in items of clothing” (Moreno Villa 1939, p. 34). The court jester was not only amusing because of his ingrained wittiness; his bodily build made him an asset as a laughing stock (Welsford 1961, p. 56). The king would spare no expense on providing jesters with as many commodities as they might fancy. Moreno Villa refers to the case of the jester Guzman who, in the period of a year, had 95 pairs of shoes.

Philip de Valois spent large amounts of money on covering his jester’s bed with leather and providing him with luxury. Ledgers at Monasterio del Escorial attest to how Queen María Luisa de Orleans made sure that Bernarda Blasco, her dwarf attendant, would always have four pounds of snow in summer and an adequate supply of coal in winter, in addition to fabric for blouses, doublets, and silk dresses; pillows; and handkerchiefs. Still, Hidalgos and low noblemen regarded them as a debased standard of humanity in which they found some comfort, (Southworth 1998, p.1)³ and authorities were only forgiving to a certain extent when it came to overly defiant jokes and jesters (Fig. 8.3).⁴

Fig. 8.3

La infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia y Madalena Ruiz. Sánchez-Coello (1586). Museo del Prado, Madrid. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrato_de_la_infanta_Isabel_Clara_Eugenia#/media/File:Alonso_S%C3%A1nchez_Coello_001.jpg

Sebastián de Covarrubias (1539–1613), Spanish lexicographer and best known for having written the first monolingual dictionary of the Spanish language, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), defined jester as “a Tuscan word, meaning a rogue, coarse, a fool” ((Covarrubias 1611/1979, p. 243). Covarrubias also suggested hypothetical etymologies for the word, derived from Latin bufo-bufonis, “venomous toad or frog,” Covarrubias 1611/1979, p. 243) that resemble the jesters in that “they pour shameful impudence from their mouths with which they entertain the stupid and indiscreet” Covarrubias, [1611] 1979, p. 243) “por estar echando de su boca desvergüenças, con que entretienen a necios e indiscretos” and from farce, a pointless thing “void of substance and full of wind” (translated). Finally, the scholar draws our attention to the fact that the Tuscan word bufa means scuffle or brawl “because the jester fights with everybody and everybody fights him” (Covarrubias 1611/1979, p. 243). Luis Peñalver distinguishes between fools, low-witted jesters, and people with physical deformities, and knaves and lowly people like the improvisation actor Pablo de Valladolid. The slow-witted ones or people with disabilities were allowed to tell the truth as if they were an oracle of sorts amidst the legion of flatterers and sycophants that surrounded the King in the constrained environment of the Royal Court. Knaves, on the other hand, were accused by moralist writers of being ingratiators, hated by the people because of their closeness to the King and their privileges (Peñalver 2005).

According to German Jestbooks, Jesters performed in all kinds of social situations. They were not taken seriously, but because their physical or mental limitations granted them compassion, they could afford to speak the truth (Zijderveld 1982). The rascals or rogues that populated the court of Philip IV were creatures of the limen; they inhabited an intermediate world between the ordinary people of Spain and the refined world of the court and the clergy. Under the cloak of amusement, they could be painfully truthful about the harsh economical realities of an Empire in decline in ways that were not allowed to the court members. This intermediate world of “ambiguity and paradox”⁵ was built on the social subordination of the Ancient Regime, but free at the same time both from the strictures of court and from the scarcity of the pueblo llano, the lay people of Spain.

As Victor Turner would put it, the sabandijas or truhanes,Jesters, dwarfs, and other people of amusement inhabit a place of “ambiguity and paradox,” and are liminal creatures (Turner 1965, p. 245). They take part in court life by being its antithesis. They are the underside of Royal protocol; their life in Palace embodies the communitarian base of life, that of domesticity as opposed to the hieratic Royalty: “The figures, representing the poor and the deformed appear to symbolize the moral values of the communitas as against the coercive power of supreme political rulers” (Turner 1977, p. 110). Jesters are included because of their exclusion, they lurk on the threshold, inside and outside at the same time. They belong to society, but also depend on it.

But the feudal stratified society also depended on the jester. Jesters are the institutionalization of liminarity. It was they who objected to the theological legitimacy of a political power whose divine origins were questioned by everyday life. As Gluckmann puts it, “… in a system where it was difficult for others to rebuke the head of the political unit, we might have here an institutionalized joker, operating at the highest point of the unit” (Gluckman 1965, p. 103). Enid Welsford writes about Claus Narr, a slow-witted jester who lived in the German vicinity of Randstat and who amused the repartee with this story.

The first wonder is that barefooted monks who have no money at all build magnificent houses, when everybody else needed to pay bricklayers. The second wonder, said Claus, is that preaching orders in Leipzig daily acquire so much corn that they have become very wealthy, yet never in my life have I seen them doing any agricultural work (Welsford 1961, p. 234).

Welsford quite correctly makes the point that Luther’s theses were not so daring but he was nevertheless prosecuted (Welsford 1961, p. 234). The jester would serve as a valve to the social pressures of the Anciéne Regime, but the kind of rebellion they carried out could only take place within farce. However, the suspicion that the jester raised in rulers and diplomats alike proves that farce was not completely harmless. As Bakhtin put it, the jester opposes “lies, flattery and hypocrisy” (Bajtin 1998, p. 87), destructing power because it reveals its truth. The jester communicates the Royal palace with the Commoner and relates the rigid hierarchy of the feudal society with the communitas. It is the explicit acknowledgment of the following: “… liminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low” (Turner 1977, p. 97). The glaring contrast between their Highnesses the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia and King Felipe IV and their “Lownesses” Madalena Ruiz and Diego de Acedo does not preclude that the latter knew they belonged to a common world (Fig. 8.4).

Fig. 8.4

El bufón Diego de Acedo (1644). Diego Velázquez da Silva. Museo del Prado, Madrid. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_buf%C3%B3n_don_Diego_de_Acedo,_el_Primo

Already known in antiquity, buffoons and jesters were part of the banquets and courts during the Middle Ages. A source of entertainment, they were also known as “men of amusement” and were also called upon at banquets and on whichever occasion a loosening of the strictures of court life was needed. Jesters, as Welsford said,

… are a source of entertainment, their company is welcome, good stories about them accumulate and if they have little conscience and no shame, they often manage to make a handsome profit out of their supposed irresponsibility (Welsford 1961, p. 3).

Buffoons and jesters appear profusely in the Royal court chronicles from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, but they did not reach the spotlight of court life until the fifteenth—sixteenth century, in the historical twilight between the end of the Middle Ages and the brink of modernity. As the main empire of its time, the Spanish court of the Austrians had plenty of buffoons,⁶ as the royal correspondence revealed. However, out of all the kings of his dynasty Philip IV was most fond of them. Philip the IV, at once “moody and frivolous,”⁷ was one of these men, “of whom Erasmus tells us in his Praise of Folly that without their fools they can neither eat nor drink nor while away a single hour. These fools are inseparable from him appearing in the theatre at festivities and public audiences by his side and having free access everywhere.”⁸

Philip IV was not only fond of buffoonery, but also a dedicated protector of the arts, who had the good fortune of having his prime minister recruit for him one of the most talented court painters ever, Diego da Silva Velázquez, who made the most of his friendship and patronage.

During Antiquity through to the Baroque period, people with physical anomalies were recruited to join the Courts or occupy positions of social prestige, or else could find their place in society within a theologically legitimized charity system. It was not until the period between the last part of the eighteenth century and the very end of the nineteenth century, what Foucault terms “The Classical Age,” that people with deviant bodily builds were segregated or classified into bio-political categories. Foucault himself points out how, during the eighteenth century, there appears a then-unheard-of “utilitarian analysis of poverty” (Foucault 1999, p. 93), which aims to substitute the “global enshrinement of the poor” (Foucault 1999, p. 93), characterized by the Old System. It is in this context of making work compulsory that the handicapped becomes an avatar of the deserving poor. As opposed to the buffoon or the blind man who went from village to village singing ballads, the handicapped (not yet disabled) is the one who is incapable of productive work.

3 The Monster Enters Natural History

The word monster comes from Latin through its vulgar form monstruum, which at the same time derives from the Latin verb monere, “to warn.” Monsters were therefore considered to be creatures of ill omen. According to mythologist Rene Girard (2005), monster characters in Greek tragedy display monster-like features to warn about the impending return of original violence in times of peace. The monster addresses what erupts out of normalcy, what strikes the understanding and the senses alike, akin to the prodigies which during the Middle Ages referred to hurricanes or to any phenomena that resisted explanation, as well as to the creatures deemed to bear a preternatural meaning or admonition. It was not until the eighteenth century that Kaspar Friedrich Wolff ended his Objecta Meditationem Theoria Monstruorum with a categorical “Monsters are not the work of God but of Nature” (Roe 1981, p. 29). By then they had already lost their links with both God and the Devil; the question concerning their meaning had given way to that of their place in the creation. There was an overlapping between theological inquiry and the nascent sciences of life. This “disenchantment of the monstrous,” as Michael Hagner (1999, p. 35) likes to term it, started in the Renaissance and extended well into the eighteenth century. The display of Monsters in Wunderkammers was the first step in the secularization of horror.

During the eighteenth century, the monster becomes a natural phenomenon. Monsters enter natural history, which is, as Foucault defined it, “the description of the visible” (Foucault 1982, p. 134). Monsters become interesting for natural history in that they contest Linnaeus’s system of classification for animals as he presented it in Systema Naturae: form, quantity, magnitude, and relative disposition of elements in space. Monsters have to be classified according to these features. There is a conceptual limit to monstrosity, which helps to consolidate Ambroise Paré’s distinction between monsters and prodigies. The brand-new science, teratology, studies those living creatures that do not fit into Linnaeus’s classification. As Canguilhem (1976) would put it, they show the hiatus in the system of classification:

Monsters had been treated as substitutes for the crucial experiences capable of deciding between two systems concerning generation and the development of plants and animals: Preformationism and Epigenesis. They had been used to provide the great chain of being theory with the argument of transitional forms, or as Leibniz said, of middle species. As they appeared especially ambiguous, monsters ensured the passage from one species to another. Their existence provides the spirit with the concept of continuity: Natura non facit saltus, non datur hiatus formarum (p. 210).

Monsters became a brand new category for exceptionality in living beings: as Canguilhem points out: “there is no mineral monster” (1976, p. 201). However, as late as 1706, Louis Lémery (1738) wrote in Mémoire sur les monstres:

Any animal born with a structure that defies the natural order, or very different to that one of the animal species he belongs to, and I do not mean to a light and shallow difference: anything that does not cause genuine awe does not deserve to be called a monster” (1738, np. https://archive.org/details/mmoiresdelacad00acad).

The definition still evokes the horror of Melanchton’s pamphlet, but the monster appears in Lémery as something against Nature, rather than a preternatural admonition.

The monster addresses a kind of infraction of natural normativity, a ratio u ordo rerum. In the eighteenth century there is an attempt to make distinctions through taxonomy and classification, as opposed to the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when, as Canguilhem put it, “… the mad and the sane lived within society and monsters lived among the normal people” (Canguilhem 1976, p. 209). Diderot and Robinet were interested in embryological specimens showing what medicine now recognizes as disability-causing conditions. This was the case of many of the “monstrous births” collected in Ruysch’s Thesaurus Anatomicum, in which Siamese twins and supernumerary limbs were abundant and prominent. Bought in 1717 by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia, it is now in the KunstKamera Museum, which also holds the Tsar’s personal collection, including hermaphrodite twins captured in a farm in Siberia, and bicephalic fetuses, confiscated from the midwives by the royal favorites. Peter the Great of Russia banned the burial of fetuses with physical deformities, sending the Royal Guard to fetch any creature worthy of forming part of his collection, vested as he was by the moral authority in the fight against superstition.

Still, many now labeled as disabled would be excluded from both the Thesaurus Anatomicum and Peter the Great’s collection because they do not challenge Linnaeus’s classification system.

With a long historical tradition, the monster addressed the wondrous, the preternatural—that which was praeter naturam, beyond nature. Only in the eighteenth century does it begin to be used as a term for natural creatures, referring to the living; the aim of collecting them was no longer to amaze, but to educate and prevent superstition. From then on, monster became a category of the living: again, as Canguilhem says, “There is no mineral monster” (Canguilhem 1976, p. 140).

In the twentieth century, monstrosity was the biological correlative to the concept of biological normalcy. In 1989, Pere Alberch (1989) published an article entitled The Logic of Monsters: Evidence for Internal Constraint in Development and Evolution. The text, which would become the foundation of the Evo-Devo theory in biology, shows how monsters had their own logic, namely how developmental abnormalities make developmental laws evident.

Unlike previous expressions like “handicapped” or “maimed,” disability “is co-extensive with rehabilitation and their extension in time” (Stiker 1999, p. 128). Rehabilitation is then not only a set of procedures, but also an ideology that aims to include people with disabilities under the paradigm of assimilation. In the attempt of including a group in society lies the assumption that they are in fact excluded. As Stiker (1999) notes: “… the disabled, henceforth of all kinds, are established as a category to be reintegrated and thus to be rehabilitated” (p. 134). Disability singles out a group to be cared for or healed. Disability is there to consolidate the norm. The rehabilitation culture of “as if” diversity was accepted conceals it twice. The theological legitimization of hierarchy designated people with non-normative constitutions as creatures, either of God or of the Devil. They were there to awe, without any attempt to domesticate their alterity. I am not idealizing a society in which death was too often the destiny for non-conforming people, but wish to draw to the reader’s attention the fact that there were approaches other than rehabilitation and its double concealment. The transformation of prodigy in personal tragedy demanding the intervention of medicine and social services is recent and has increased life expectancy and quality of life for many people, but subjecting them to what Foucault (1982) termed “medical power,” which made a social destiny of exclusion out of diagnostics.

4 Conclusion

What do Sebastian de Morra and the two-headed fetuses of Ruysch’s Thesaurus Anatomicum have in common? What do Siamese twins and the jesters that appeal to us from Velázquez’s portraits have in common? If Peñalver is right in the quote that heads this text, both are “elusive, hard to capture,” what then is the slippery surface in which they are rooted? Monsters seem to elude the strictures of the ordo rerum. As Foucault (1971) points out, “… the monster ensures the emergence of difference. This difference is still without law and without any well-defined structure. The monster is the root stock of specification” (p. 171). With the consolidation of natural history in the eighteenth century, the monster anticipates the science of the relation of the individual with his type. The monster is thus the raison d’être of Kantian critical distance: the proof that phenomenical evidence is never conceptualized to its full plurality. The jester, on the other hand, addresses the communitas of Court life, the human link without which Court life could not exist. The monster and the jester are the two faces of Janus: sinister and hilarious. They look to opposite directions: to the end and to the new beginning while inhabiting the threshold. The monster shows the precariousness of our concepts about the living. As Canguilhem said, monsters belong to the imagination—“Nature is poor in monsters” (1988, p. 137). The jester, on the other hand, is the ambassador of the grotesque and the Carnival. Where the monster makes evident the irreducibility of the living, the jester is the institutionalization of liminarity. Opposed to both monsters and jesters, disability is this bio-political category which designates all of us with non-normative bodies.

• This article was published the by Encrucijadas: Revista Crítica de Ciencias sociales under the title “Nombrar de la deformidad física: breve reflexión en torno al término discapacidad y sus usos recientes.” I am indebted to Patxi Lanceros, Ana Romero de Pablos, and Jesús Rodríguez Velasco who read previous versions of the manuscript. The link to the original article in Spanish is http://www.encrucijadas.org/index.php/ojs/article/view/216/176