In the Middle Ages, the term “blind” was capacious, denoting both complete lack of sight and lesser forms of visual impairment. Though absolute blindness was generally considered beyond medical remedy, treatments for innumerable other ocular complaints were ubiquitous in medieval leechbooks and remedy collections. In Beatrix Busse and Annette Kern-Stähler's words, these Middle English medical texts describe visual impairment not as a total, static state, but as liminal: a “gradual process of decay or of moving towards blindness,” what they call “blindness as a process of becoming.”1
This article explores how conceptualizing blindness as a dynamic movement, rather than a static state, might illuminate the relationship between late medieval medical and literary cultures. I focus on the devotional poetry of fifteenth-century priest John Audelay, which is preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302; a brief overview of this manuscript and its treatment of Audelay's impairment is provided below....
