Chapter 3 - Blyndharpours and Kakeharpours: Accommodating Blindness in Premodern Performance

Summary

One of the most well represented traditional categories of so-called “disability” in the REED evidence is blindness. Performers described as being blind appear across the records for early performance, and especially in the numerous accountancy records. This arguably testifies to a degree of popularity for the performer type. Moreover, the late-medieval evidence appears to show a propensity for recording named or nicknamed blind performers—in particular, as solo musicians such as harpists. This gives even greater credence to a potential fashion for this type of performer in the period. Further, it appears to suggest a notion of the conceptualization of blindness as either having affinity with, or even informing certain styles of musical performance. Blind stringed instrument players are legion in REED. Their presence illustrates what may be the largest group of ostensibly “disabled” (although the dis- is clearly redundant) performers in the premodern record.

This chapter first considers the apparently not-so-unique case of a cruel display of blind “performance” from late-medieval Paris. The shocking representation of this incident has meant that it has received a lot of attention from historians and from recent scholars working on historic disability. Discussion then turns to a figure much more representative of the evidence in the British and Irish record: that of the professional or itinerant blind musician. Detailing the appearance of characters like “William [the] Blind-harper of Newcastle” in the accounts from Durham Priory, the chapter goes on to consider the position and relative popularity of such figures in the premodern record. Ultimately it details how, for musically-minded monastics, mayors, and monarchs, blindness “entertained.”

Blind Performance and the Bataille Estrange

In his study Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability, Edward Wheatley opens with the story of an infamous and shocking event recorded in Paris in 1425. In the anonymous Journal d’un Bourgeois De Paris (1405–1449), there is record of a cruel “entertainment”—Middle French “esbatement”—ascribed to August of that year, involving a group of blind persons. It reads:

la darrenier dimenche du moys d’aoust, fut fait ung esbatement en l’ostel nommé d’Arminac, en la rue Sainct-Honoré, que on mist IIII aveugles tous armez en ung [parc], chascun ung baston en sa main, et en ce lieu avoit ung fort pourcel, lequel ilz devoient avoir s’ilz le povoient tuer.