TY  - BOOK
AU  - Richard,Olivier
TI  - The blind beating the pig. Rite, disability and urban society in the late Middle Ages
PY  - 2015///.
							
N1  - 7
N2  - In Lübeck, Stralsund, Paris, Bruges, Arnhem, Ypres, Dordrecht, Speyer, Zwickau, Heidelberg, Cologne and most certainly many more cities, a rather strange game took place in the late Middle Ages. A few blind men were placed in an enclosure with a pig. Each of them had a stick, with which they had to beat the animal to death; the winner took home the carcass. Yet, in the midst of the hustle, they would hit each other more than the pig, much to the delight of the crowd. This cruel custom is not unknown. Since the Renaissance, it has been the topic of several literary texts and works within the graphic arts. Some sanitized forms of the game (no killing, non-impaired participants with a blindfold) exist to this day. Moreover, several historical studies have addressed it over the past number of years; most of them insist upon the cruelty of laughing, mocking and stigmati­zing visually impaired persons in the late Middle Ages. Yet disability studies teach us that disability is a social and cultural construction, so that one should not interpret this “game” outside of the context that produced it. There are several possible ways of understanding it. On the one hand, this game can be seen as a catharsis in which the blind are to be seen above all as beggars: the poor, particularly beggars, were subjected to strong social control in late medieval towns. By mocking the blind and inflicting violence upon them, the townfolk were disciplining them. At the same time, it functioned as a means of exorcizing the fear that was caused by their disability. On the other hand, the choice of a pig as the blind men’s adversary, which has been largely neglected by scholars so far, is not indifferent, for this animal functions as a perfect double for the blind, both in theology and in the medieval ima­ginaire. Pigs were often associated with the devil or with sin. Thus, one can understand why several exempla, for instance by Jacques de Vitry, use the game as a metaphor for mankind’s struggle with sin, while others compare the pig in the game with a bad preacher misleading the faithful. Finally, the game has to be interpreted in the context of urban political communication, as it was always organized by the city authorities. Several features of the show are similar to those of other urban games from the same era, in particular the ones taking place during Carnival: the inversion—here the weak imitating the strong—or the parody (cf. the numerous parodies of tournaments). It can then be compared to other shows like prostitutes’ races, which both humiliated the participants and gave them a function—that of mocking the enemy or, in other cases, the authorities. In the end, the polysemy of this game, which is typical of medieval rites, reflects the ambivalent position of (visually) impaired people in medieval so­ciety: their liminality
UR  - https://shs.cairn.info/journal-revue-historique-2015-3-page-525?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
ER  -