Blindness as Form: Rethinking Disability with Matthew Paris

Recent creative encounters between visually impaired people and various art-forms show us new ways to read blindness in medieval manuscripts.

About this Inaugural lecture

Blindness is error and ignorance, eyesight is knowledge and insight. But as soon as people ponder this age-old axiom, they begin to question the nature of knowledge and the role of the senses in apprehending reality. They may go on to think creatively and innovatively about the ways in which visually impaired people encounter different art forms, and about the possibilities these open up for our wider understanding of art. This lecture puts recent work on such encounters into dialogue with two medieval verbal and visual saints’ lives by the 13th-century writer and illustrator Matthew Paris.

About the speaker

Jane Gilbert is Professor of Medieval Literature and Critical Theory in SELCS-CMII. She has published widely on medieval French and English literature, especially in dialogue with modern critical theory. Her current research project explores innovative ways to think about form in the multilingual, multimedia contexts of medieval literature.

Photo: Sourced from Wikipedia

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