Being disabled in the medieval era

Welcome back to the History Extra podcast. Prothetic legs, wheelbarrow wheelchairs and guide children were just some of the assistive technologies and body augmentations available to our medieval and early modern ancestors. From bionic knights to perspectival monks, Ray Gillibrand, lecturer in inclusive learning at the University of Leeds, highlights how bodily difference was understood in this pre-modern era and explores the medieval marketplace and community support that was available. Speaking to Emily Brefitt, Ray reveals a world of ingenuity. Adaptation and care. I'm so excited to be talking to you today. First and foremost, I think there's a perception that

Disability technology is something that only really came up like really came about after the first world war. Now I'm curious, what is your opinion on that perception? You're totally right. Whenever I talk about my work and my research, you get this idea that, you know, this is all something that happened at the the turn of the twentieth century. And before that, it was just awful, life was terrible, there was no assistive technology. Oh, I find that When I'm talking to people about my research, you get things like It was all like the hunchback of Notre Dame. Disney has a lot to answer for there, or

More Disney Captain Hook in Peter Pan, you know, it's all all this kind of perception. But that's just not true. So actually there's a really long and rich history of assistive technology in the pre modern period, which I'm excited to chat through with you today. Now from your awareness, things that you've encountered in your research, how far does this history stretch back? Is there ancient stuff that you might point us to? Obviously today we're talking about stuff that's slightly later than that. Absolutely. So My research focuses more or less on the periods from fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred. So I think about that that little like gap of time that people often forget about. We've got this sort of situation where historians say that the Middle Ages ended in fifteen hundred and the early modern period started in fifteen hundred.

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