Afterword

Summary

Despite Those Isolated examples of cruelty or barbarism—the treatment of the blind men in the pig game from the fifteenth-century Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris, the 1265 court case of Augustine le Fevere and his fatal frightening of the innocent William Pilche, etc.—it is clear that, for much of the period under consideration, the treatment of figures with potential mental, sensory, or physical difference in Britain and Ireland tended to be accommodating, even humane. And this is true even for the early medieval period: in Irish law, for example, heavy penalties were levied on those who mocked those living with epilepsy, leprosy, physical impairment, blindness, or deafness.

On the other hand, that early modern practice of maintaining or keeping individuals identified as “natural fools” and/or “dwarfs” as court entertainments requires further scrutiny. Their positioning within their relative societies continues to raise uncomfortable questions about how such individuals may have been socialized and/or accommodated. Such questions which continue find resonance with modern conceptualizations of the disabled Other.

The historical evidence provided by REED proves itself equally as enlightening as the many, often-studied fictional or otherwise idealized examples appearing in premodern art and literature. REED has the potential to help uncover stories of liminal or marginalized performers whose positions in their respective cultures may be difficult to discern, but whose discernment is worth attempt, nonetheless. The records, for example, for medieval Durham's “Tom Fool,” the prior's own fool; for William “Blindharper” of Newcastle; for Scotland's royally maintained fool Curry; for Master Nicholas, the “dwarf” harper of York—the evidence for such individuals’ existence, subsistence, and performance continues to inform our wider understanding of premodern performance culture, as well as of the socialization and conceptualization of the era's ostensibly “disabled.”

Disability—the potential anachronism of the term laid aside—and the potential for diversion, wonderment, or “entertainment” offered by a perception of mental, intellectual, sensory, or physical difference, formed a key role in medieval and early modern performance culture. It is of course attested in the scripted “cripping up” on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. Yet, this study has brought together various kinds of evidence in order to prompt wider, potentially more nuanced understanding of disability in performance. And this points to a related subject-field with which this study has dealt with only in passing: one that marks distinction between “performance” and what I have called “performativity.”