ABSTRACT
According to his autobiography, intense pain, the loss of eyesight and the disfigurement of his face are among the first memorable experiences of Johann von Soest (1448–1506), a writer, physician and musician born in Unna, Westphalia. His life had been characterized from the start by misery and suffering, or at least so he tells us, thereby evoking the conditio humana he shared with his audience. 1 Interestingly, the position of this pre-modern narrator is also the starting point of a recent field of research: many scholars in the field of disability history share this notion of a fragile human existence that is generally marked by phases of vulnerability, even if these are not automatically associated with suffering or misery. Against this backdrop I refer to ‘infirmity’ not as a biological or physiological factor, but as a cultural concept that is fundamentally based on the opinion that the human body is a non-static, changeable entity, and that all human bodies are prone to weakness, disintegration and deficiency. 2 In this chapter I am going to ask whether ‘infirmity’ could be employed as a significant category in pre-modern life writing. First I take a look at German autobiographical accounts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that relate to experiences of ‘infirmity’; in a second step I ask whether biographical accounts of people who were described first and foremost as ‘infirm’ by close relatives share any narrative traits with these texts. My aim is to determine whether an underlying discourse of ‘disability’ can be identified with regard to these closely related types of texts. What both types have in common is that they are part of an endeavour that can be called domestic writing, a fairly recent trend in late medieval historiography concerned mainly with family history and genealogical information, but also suitable for individual self-affirmation as well as for moral instruction and biographical exempla. Many of these texts were written for immediate family members, but some of them circulated well beyond this restricted group of recipients.
