ABSTRACT
The Middle Ages are often portrayed as a time in which people with physical disabilities in the Latin West were ostracized, on the grounds that such conditions demonstrated personal sin and/or God’s judgment. This was undoubtedly the dominant response to disability in various times and places during the 5th–15th centuries, but the total range of medieval responses is much broader and more interesting. In particular, the 13th–15th century treatment of three groups – martyrs, mothers, and mystics – whose physical “defects” were often understood as signs of special connection to God in this life (and who were often represented as retaining these signs in the life to come) challenge both medieval and modern notions of beauty, disfigurement, and bodily perfection, particularly as the notion is applied to our (everlasting) final end.
