Chapter 5 - Orthopaedic Variance as Performance

Summary

The Saints’ Healing of an infirmed limb or organ is a recurrent theme in hagiographic literature, particularly from the earlier medieval period. In Ælfric's account of the life of St. Swithin of Winchester, for instance, he reports that the saint's shrine “wæs eall behangen mid criccun and mid creopera sceamelum” (“was hung all around with the crutches and stools of the cripples [sic]”). And this observation is backed up by later evidence: the various miracles attributed to the pre-Conquest cult of St. Swithin are well attested in BL Royal MS 15 C VII, which also lists left walking sticks, wax limb effigies, and other votive offerings left at the shrine. The loss of a limb or other appendage by disease, violence or accident could, of course, result in a kind of occasional performance. This is something the Jew Jonathas learns to his horror in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament: initially deprived of the hand he has used to desecrate the host, his handless-ness becomes the chief comic business of the latter half of the play. This is where Wheatley's religious model of disability theory and Mitchell and Snyder's notion of narrative prosthesis could be said to work in tandem. Indeed, the two dovetail at the Croxton play's conclusion: appearing to the Jews after bursting out of an oven, the bloodied character of Christ (Jesus) equates Jonathas's missing hand to his missing faith:

JESUS: Jonathas, on thyn hand thow art but lame,

And ys thorow thyn own cruelnesse,

For thyn hurt thu mayest thiselfe blame:

Thow woldyst preve thy powre Me to oppresse.

But now I consydre thy necesse:

Thow wasshest thyn hart with grete contrycion.

Go to the cawdron—thi care shal be the lesse—

And towche thyn hand to thy salvacion.

Here shall Ser Jonathas put hys hand into the cawdron,

and yt shal be hole agayn… . (lines 770–77)

Again, here is a clear late-medieval example in support of Wheatley's religious model of disability, a model applicable to a great deal of literary representations in the period. “Lameness” results from cruelness; contrition brings salvacion in the form of a renewed hand. Jonathas's response to the miraculous healing—“Thou haste sent me lyghtyng [relief] that late was lame”; “Thu hast put me from duresse and dysfame” (lines 791–93)—conflates his physical wholeness with his spiritual wholeness. The formerly wicked character is literally re-formed.