Intersections of Gender and Disability for Women in Early Medieval England: A Preliminary Investigation

ABSTRACT

This article considers how disability affects women in early medieval England through an examination of the word, “unhælu,” a term that means unhealthy, but could refer to many different maladies that could constitute a disability. Women were particularly susceptible to unhælu due to the effects of poor nutrition and infection during childbirth and menstruation, and women’s unhælu could be treated through their reproductive organs, even for unrelated ailments. For instance, a lack of speech could be remedied with a pessary and an emmenagogue. Social status played a large role in how being unhælu affected a woman’s life, as a rich woman could pay for care and transportation, rather than relying on family. In religious contexts, being unhælu could have advantages, particularly if it made it possible to transcend corporality and to preserve virginity.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Mitchell and Snyder, x.

2 Ibid.

3 Deegan and Brooks, 229. It should be noted that “handicap” is an offensive term, which implies the dependence of people with disabilities on charity; however, “double handicap” is the standard term that is used within scholarship on the topic.

4 Fine and Asch, 233.

5 Ibid., 233–5.

6 Meekosha, 165.

7 World Health Organization, World Report on Disability.

8 For powerful stories about disabled women’s greater struggles with health-care, see Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Healthcare Stories.

9 Christina Lee briefly addresses the topic in her overview of disabiliy in the period. “Disability,” 23–38.

10 Klein, 39–40. Klein provides the example of Judith in the eponymous Old English poem as a woman who acts in masculine ways within the military arena, but who ultimately does not transcend her sex.

11 For a fuller discussion of this concept, see my forthcoming chapter “Hælu and Unhælu.”

12 For a discussion of the word’s etymology, see Skevington, 12.

13 Skevington, 12.

14 Beowulf, lines 120b–21a.

15 Lee, “Disability,” 34.

16 I discuss this issue in more depth in the forthcoming “Hælu and Unhælu.”

17 The early medieval English people had specific terms for certain conditions, such as visual or mobility impairments. These terms suggest that they had some categories in place, but those categories did not include equivalents to “impairment,” “deformity,” or “disability.” For a discussion of one such semantic category, see Roberts, 365–78.

18 Ibid., 41; Potkay and Evitt, 1.

19 Buck, 41.

20 Tracy, Torture and Brutality, 61.

21 Lees and Overing, 31–40; Watt, “Literature in Pieces: Female Sanctity and the Relics of Early Women’s Writing,” 357–80.

22 Watt, “The Earliest Women’s Writing? Anglo-Saxon Literary Cultures and Communities,” 537–554.

23 Metzler, 127–28.

24 As mentioned earlier, the early medieval English people did not have nuanced concepts of sex and gender, and they would only have recognized ciswomen as female. As a result, I am only able to discuss ciswomen’s diseases and impairments in this article, although I recognize that transwomen are equally female.

25 Simi Linton explains that the medical model casts “human variation as a deviation from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and, significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy”. This model constructs disability as an individual condition or personal health problem that calls for medical intervention. This medical intervention has the primary aim of curing or ameliorating people’s impairments, but also serves a gatekeeping function by determining who has access to other forms of social assistance. Linton, Disability, Difference, Discrimination, 59.

26 The efficacy of early medieval English medicine has been the subject of some debate. Early scholars, such as Grattan and Singer, assert that only a tiny minority of the remedies would be effective against the conditions they claim to treat, since they are based primarily in magical beliefs. Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine, 92. M. L. Cameron has subsequently challenged that claim, and shown that their curative practices were more rational than was previously believed, and many may have had their basis in the practitioners’ empirical observations of their patients. Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 180. Nonetheless, when scholars have tested even the most promising, seemingly scientific remedies, they have met with more failure than success. Barbara Brennessel, Michael D.C. Drout, and Robyn Gravel found that all but one of the remedies from Bald’s Leechbook they tested were ineffective in inhbiting the growth of bacteria. “A Reassessment of the Efficacy of Anglo-Saxon Medicine,” 183–96. More recently, Freya Harrison et al. showed that a recipe from Bald’s Leechbook is effective against Staphylococcus Aureus. “A 1000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity,” e01129–15.

27 Ibid., 233–5.

28 Although beyond the scope of this particular article, it would be worth teasing out the respective status of male and female slaves, poor freemen and -women, and elite freemen and -women, both with and without unhælu. I offer some initial thoughts on this subject in my dissertation, “Unhælu: Anglo-Saxon Conceptions of Impairment and Disability.”

29 Lantfred, 298, 502.

30 Crawford, 1–12.

31 Lee, “Disability,” 26.

32 Lee, “Changing Faces,” 66.

33 Bede, Ecclesiastical History, 462–3. Perhaps significantly, forty days and forty nights, and forty years are the traditional periods for trials and hardship in the Bible. To cite just a few of many examples: Noah’s flood lasted forty days and nights (Genesis 7:12); Moses spent forty years in the desert (Acts 7:30); Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years (Numbers 14:33–34); Jesus was tempted for forty days and nights (Matthew 4:2); and Jesus remained on earth for forty days after the resurrection (Acts 1:3). All Biblical references are to the Douay-Rheims version.

34 Lee, “Disability,” 26.

35 Ibid.

36 Wulfstan, 506.

37 Simeon, 81.

38 Bede, 362–63.

39 Ibid.

40 Lantfred, 288. All translations are mine.

41 Ibid., 302, 304.

42 Fell, 169.

43 Ibid.

44 Deegan, 17–26; Cameron, 174–84; Osborn, 145–61.

45 Ibid.

46 Weston, 281. For a full discussion of women’s healing function in the household, see Meaney, “Women, Witchcraft, and Magic,” 9–40.

47 Osborn, 145.

48 Meaney, Amulets, 249–50.

49 Weston, 281; Osborn, 145.

50 Pettit, ed., 1:112.

51 Weston, 282.

52 Ibid., 291.

53 For a discussion of male condemnation of these practices, also see Meaney, “Women, Witchcraft, and Magic,” 9–40.

54 Deegan, 18.

55 Bullough and Campbell, 317–25; Fell, 168; Cameron, 17–18.

56 Deegan, 18.

57 Ibid.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 Fell, 168.

61 Ibid.

62 Cockayne, 2:172.

63 Meaney, “Variant Versions,” 235–68.

64 Cameron, 134.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., 134–35.

67 Cockayne, 2:342.

68 Buck, 48.

69 Cockayne, 2:343; Cameron, 40.

70 Buck, 48.

71 Ibid.

72 Cameron et al., Dictionary of Old English, s.v. “hægtessa.”

73 Jolly, 6.

74 Ibid., 6–8.

75 Ibid, 8; Cameron et al., Dictionary of Old English, s.v. “cwidol.”

76 It is worth noting that early medieval English people recognized that unhælu was also a natural part of men’s life course as they aged; however, the texts do not attest to maleness per se as a cause of unhælu.

77 Fine and Asch, 233.

78 Fell, 40–50.

79 Lee, 26.

80 Cameron, 41–42.

81 Cockayne, 2:148.

82 Hall has raised the possibility that these distinctions may correspond to different kinds of jaundice. For instance, he notes that an orange-yellow tint (i.e. a red tint) may indicate hepatitis, and a blackish-yellow tint neoplastic disease. “Calling the Shots,” 204. Men and women may recover more effectively from some causes of jaundice than others. For instance, new research has indicated that women are more capable of spontaneously clearing acute hepatitis C virus infection, which might explain why they have a better prognosis if their skin is orange-yellow. Grebely et al., 109–20.

83 Perhaps significantly, the early medieval English people associated elves with gender transgression, which may form part of the logic of this remedy. Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, 175.

84 For a discussion of how female saints “attain to the perfect man,” see Trilling, “Heavenly Bodies,” 253–54.

85 Tracy, Torture and Brutality, 55.

86 Trilling, 265–66.

87 Ibid., 273.

88 It is important to note that we do not have any early medieval English witnesses to this story. The earliest extant version of this story is found in Roger of Wendover’s thirteenth-century chronicle, which does not rule out the possibility that it was known in early medieval England, and contemporary accounts have not survived. In fact, Jane Tibbetts Schulenberg has argued that the story may have more basis in historical fact than was previously believed, and that Roger may have based his chronicle on a lost source from Tynemouth. Forgetful of Their Sex, 169.

89 Isidore’s Etymologies, which was among the most influential books in early medieval England, illustrates these assumptions. It notes that Latin femina, “woman” is derived from the parts of the thighs/genitals (femur) that look different from those of a man, or from a Greek etymology that means “fiery force” and refers to the woman’s greater libido. Isidore, 242. In Christian Latin, femur sometimes was used as a euphemism for the genitals that were located between the thighs. Adams, 51.

90 Tracy, “‘Al defoulden is holie bodi’,” 103.

91 Ibid.

92 Kelly, 95.