ABSTRACT
I n the centuries of early Chris-tianity, we used to believe, the fundamental suppositions of the spiritual world of the Western Middle Ages were formulated, and the basic attitudes that were to prevail for a long time were firmly established. What is characteristic of the intellectual developments of the Middle Ages themselves, we were often tempted to think, was largely the unfolding of what was already there, even if in a concise shape, in the early Christian mind. The historian of ideas and imagery, however, soon discovers that medieval culture often profoundly deviated from the attitudes that informed the first cen-
turies of the Christian era, and that it created altogether new shapes and images for which no model is found in the early Christian world. Few issues allow us to see this so sharply as the medieval attitude toward the blind, the explanation of blindness, and mainly the distinction between different types of blind figures. Next I shall argue that the differentiation of blind figures into a few distinct, hierarchically arranged types was the original contribution of medieval culture. Previous ages, it seems, did not bequeath to the Middle Ages any models for either the typology or/and the division into upper and lower classes. These were the outcome of the specific intellectual and emotional conditions that crystallized in the course of that period.
