ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the following questions: who were the people that lay beyond the scope of honour, and what connection did this have with their intellectual status? Honour was a universal way of ordering social relationships, with an all-encompassing prescriptive force that justified discriminations of social class and gender and, to a lesser extent, ethnicity and religion. Degenerate gentry are fools in the same way that the lay idiots of the commons are. This ignorance is at once social and natural: it is the honour society that gets to define natural states of the degenerate and dishonourable, just as it is the socially constituted group of rational choosers and consenters – the intelligence society – that gets to define the place in nature of the intellectually disabled. In proving the heir’s idiocy a certain “intellectual” deficiency might be involved, but it was narrowly defined. It might mean simply illiteracy and innumeracy.