People with physical impairments lived, worked, and participated in communities throughout premodern Europe, yet their experiences remain absent from history.

Through Pictish case studies featured in the History in Our Bones exhibition at The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, this lecture introduces Visible Disabilities in Premodern Europe, a project combining skeletal evidence, historical sources, biomechanics, and creative practice to investigate disability, mobility, assistive technologies, and care.

Together, these approaches restore disabled people as participants in the social worlds of the past.

This lecture was delivered in partnership with the Scottish History Society.

CONTENT WARNING

This lecture includes images of archaeological human skeletal remains and discusses disability, physical impairment, and death in archaeological contexts.

While all material is presented respectfully and for educational purposes, some viewers may find this content distressing.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alison I. Beach is Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrews, where she directs the Centre for Archaeology, Technology, & History.

She is Co-Investigator on Visible Disabilities in Premodern Europe and Project Lead for the AHRC-funded project Word of Mouth: Embodied Stories of Premodern Women at Work. Bringing together history, archaeology, and bioarchaeology, Word of Mouth recovers the lives, work, and embodied experiences of medieval religious women across Europe.