Disability

This essay examines the intersections of disability, enslavement, and writing in the Roman Mediterranean and beyond. In particular, it develops the work of Nicholas Horsfall on visual impairments and asks, more broadly, about the variety of forms of impairment that served as barriers to participation in literate affairs. It explores both the exploitation of enslaved people as prosthetic literary devices or accommodative tools and the ways that the structures of enslavement disabled literate workers. It suggests that the experience of bodily pain may have influenced the development of literate tools and technologies, including such innovations as bookstands and the codex-format book.