ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that disability was at the heart of moral economy in the Middle Ages. Strategies of disability invalidation in the Christian Middle Ages embraced an anthropophagic element. Disability had moral use-value for propertied classes and ecclesiastical elites, serving as a means to their redemptive ends and as a scapegoat for social violence. The relationship between rank and disability was structured by a system of spiritual dependency that tied the privileged to the ‘broken timber of humanity’. The relationship between disability and non-disability in the run of the mill day-to-day excitability of the Medieval period was ‘an acceptance at times awkward, at times brutal, at times compassionate, a kind of indifferent fatalistic integration’. Disability served the moral dynamic of the Christian system of power during the centuries of superstition over which it imperiously presided. Classical and Christian cultures shared a redemptive view of humanity as theomorphic.
