Professor of English Edward Wheatley visited a graduate seminar, "Women and Disability," and gave an invited lecture on his work on blindness at the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University on February 24. The lecture was taken from the research for his current book project, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability, which has won fellowships for 2004-05 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. This opportunity was particularly relevant for Wheatley because OSU has very active programs in both Disability Studies and Medieval and Renaissance Studies, so his lecture highlighted the interdisciplinarity of the project.
This cultural studies project examines blindness in medieval France and England, deploying current theories of disability and drawing upon literature, history, art, and religious discourse. The author connects blindness as it was lived by visually impaired people to the disability as it was used metaphorically, particularly in the trope of the "blindness" of the Jews. A number of practices and institutions in France, both positive and negative -- blinding as punishment, the foundation of hospices for the blind, and some medical treatment -- resulted in not only attitudes that commodified human sight but also inhumane satire against the blind in French secular literature. Anglo-Saxon and later medieval England differed markedly in all three of these areas, and the less prominent position of blind people in society resulted in noticeably fewer cruel representations in literature.
