“Thou lump of foul deformity”: Richard III, William Shakespeare, and The Lost King

By Emmeline Burdett

The 2022 film ‘The Lost King’ tells the story of how the remains of the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III (1452-1485) were rediscovered in a car park in Leicester, in 2012. (The Plantagenet dynasty ruled England from 1154 until 1485 and was succeeded by the Tudors). The rediscovery was spearheaded by an amateur historian, Philippa Langley. The film emphasizes that Langley feels a strong kinship with Richard because she sees parallels between the way in which he was portrayed as disabled as a way of discrediting him, and the way in which she has been looked down upon as a person with ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis). It is not uncommon for people with both ME, and other hidden impairments, to spend years, if not decades, attempting to get a diagnosis from a largely unsympathetic medical profession. Indeed, several times during the film ‘The Lost King’, Langley (played by Sally Hawkins) insists ‘It [ME] is a real illness!’. She does so with all the fervour of a person who has been repeatedly made aware that ‘real illnesses’ are ones which can be readily seen and identified by others – not ones which can be felt only by the people who have them.

Historical Background

Richard III was slain at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. He was the last English king to be slain in battle. Because he was the last Plantagenet king of England, and because his death led to the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, it has been argued that the Tudors wanted to blacken his name, and that they did this in two ways – by portraying him as disabled, and by portraying him as deciding that, because he was disabled, he (in the words of William Shakespeare’s play about him) ‘could not prove a lover’, and would therefore hurtle enthusiastically down the path of least resistance and ‘prove a villain’(Langley, 2013, pp.30-52 provides an overview of this long-running debate). These ideas were given their most eloquent and enduring expression in the playwright William Shakespeare’s play Richard III, written c.1592-1594, the full title of which gives an account of Richard III’s supposed crimes, namely “his treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pitiful murther [murder] of his innocent nephews: his tyrannical vaurpation [usurpation]: with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death”. The play itself was based partly upon Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III, published in 1513. Sir Thomas More’s text focused on Richard’s appearance, describing him as

Little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favoured in appearance…’ (Sir Thomas More, quoted in Langley, 2022).

In the same way that Shakespeare’s play would later do, More’s biography makes the argument that deficiencies in Richard’s physical appearance were reflected in his character, and that

‘He was close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly friendly where he inwardly hated, not omitting to kiss where he thought to kill, pitiless and cruel…’

A Painting by an Unknown Artist

In the film ‘The Lost King’, Philippa Langley shows her husband (played by Steve Coogan) a photograph of a portrait of Richard III which has been overpainted to change his features so that they correspond more exactly to More’s description of his physical appearance. The portrait in question was first recorded in the inventory of the Tudor king Henry VIII, and analysis of its wooden panel suggests that it was painted between 1504 and 1520, probably from an earlier painting created during its subject’s lifetime. Though there is no indication of who painted the portrait, the British Library website speculates that the artist was either Flemish or British, and working at the English court. (British Library) The painting has been subject to various striking alterations – for example, the line of Richard’s coat has been altered to suggest that his right shoulder was much higher than his left, his eyes have been overpainted a steely grey and the corners of his mouth have been turned down to give him a more malevolent appearance. One alteration to which Langley draws attention in ‘The Lost King’ is that Richard’s fingers have been elongated to make them appear more like talons. These changes can be seen with the naked eye as the overpainting has aged differently from the rest of the painting. (British Library)

Figure 1 - A version of the painting in question. Credit: This Portrait by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA.

In their book The Lost King: The Search for Richard III, Langley and her co-author Michael Jones observe that, although it is now more widely accepted in academic circles that this view of Richard is deeply flawed, the image of Shakespeare’s hunchbacked, limping villain has been difficult to shake from the public imagination.(Langley, 2022, 49) Though they report that few members of the public regard Shakespeare’s portrayal as historically accurate, the fact of its existence tells us some things about fifteenth and sixteenth century English beliefs about disability. Chief amongst these was a belief in astrology, and this was of great importance to one of Richard III’s earliest detractors - the Warwickshire priest and antiquarian John Rous. In his history of the English kings, which was written during the reign of King Henry VII (1485-1509), Rous moved Richard’s date of birth from 2nd October (under the sign of Libra) forward three weeks to enable him to write ‘At his nativity Scorpio was in the ascendant … and like a scorpion he combined a smooth front with a stinging tail’.(Langley, 2022, 39). This was considered important because it tallied with the widespread belief in the power of astrology and its ability to manipulate events. (Vincent-Connolly, 2021,52).

That Richard III had a long history of being considered disabled – either because he was, or as a way of discrediting him, or both – makes a claim made in the British online journal Disability Arts Online seem rather bizarre. In an article published in October 2022, Jeffrey R. Wilson claimed that ‘Richard only really became disabled in the 1980s’. (Wilson, 2). Wilson was, though, making the point that, up until then, the possibility of Richard’s disability had not been seen as an important part of either his identity or of that of the actor who played him. This started to change with the late Antony Sher, who in 1984 drew on his memories of using elbow crutches when he broke his leg to accentuate Shakespeare’s description of Richard III as a ‘bottled spider’. Sher’s research for the role included ‘watching interviews with psychopaths’ and ‘reading about mass-murderers’, which would suggest that he was not challenging Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III as someone who had reached the top by killing anyone who got in his way. Sher also watched Stephen Dwoskin’s autobiographical film Outside In, about his experience of polio. Sher seems to have found in Dwoskin’s film a confirmation of what he already thought disability was – a purely physical experience:

Very useful for Richard. He [Dwoskin] has severe polio in both legs and has to wear complete callipers, so the legs can’t bend at all. He walks with crutches and even then, has enormous difficulty throwing each leg forward. I must use this – the hip throw. (Sher, 150)

Another sequence of him [Dwoskin] limping slowly out of the darkness into a square of light. A way of starting the play?  … You hear ‘Now is the winter’ coming from the darkness, then he starts to limp into the light… (Ibid)

 

Figure 2 - Anthony Sher as Richard III 1984. Credit: This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA.

All of this suggests that Sher believed that if his Richard III looked right, that was all that mattered. With such a visual portrayal, this was of course not irrelevant, but neither was it the only thing of any importance, particularly as the idea that he had a disability had played such a significant part in attempts to discredit him. Indeed, this seems not to have been understood, as someone with whom Sher discussed his preparation for the role suggested that Richard III’s physical disability should be a visual marker of his inner moral deformity:
Sher reports that the actor Richard Wilson asks him why the crutches that are so important to him are not mentioned in the text of the play Richard III, which Sher counters by saying that other characters keep referring to him as various four-legged creatures. Richard Wilson then asks, ‘Why should it [Richard’s physical disability] be such a hang-up otherwise?’[unless it was severe]  (Quoted in Sher, 1985,139).

Why would someone be ‘hung-up’ on relentless unnecessary mentions by those around them of a characteristic which was incessantly used as a stick to beat them with? Possibly because the person in question is not made of stone? In Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Jane describes the ‘reproach of my dependence’ as being ‘very painful and crushing’, and whilst the descriptions of Richard III were intimately connected with the play’s depiction of him as evil, rather than, as in Jane Eyre, with the dreadful crime of having been sent, as a baby, to live with rich relations who did not want her and never missed an opportunity to tell her so, it seems that he was subjected, sniper-like, to frequent uses of his disability as a way of criticising him, whether or not such criticism was actually valid. Antony Sher’s book talks about how other characters in the play ‘keep’ referring to Richard III as various four-legged creatures, and gives the specific example of his wife, Lady Anne, referring to him as “a lump of foul deformity”. (Sher, 1985,139)  Continuous reminders that one does not belong to the ‘tribe’ in which one happens to find oneself (and that, by extension, those who do belong to it, are not merely reaping the benefits of something that had nothing to do with them at all and thus for which they cannot legitimately claim any credit – well done, Lady Anne – congratulations on your colossal personal achievement!) constitute a process known as Othering, and Sher’s comment that other characters ‘keep’ referring to Richard III as various kinds of four-legged creature suggests that this happens more than once. Looking at the play itself reveals that various characters refer to Richard III as ‘a toad’, ‘a hedgehog’, ‘a bottled spider’, and so on. This takes us back to Sir Thomas More’s description of Richard III as being ‘close and secret’ and ‘outwardly friendly where he inwardly hated’, as one reaction to being Othered might be the development of a character where no-one really gets to know you. This sounds a very modern insight for a play written in about 1592-4, but a lot has been written about how acute Shakespeare’s understanding of psychology was, and of, for example, how Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex was developed thanks to Freud’s reading of Hamlet. This could be another example of Shakespeare being well ahead of his contemporaries, particularly as one does not have to be disabled to be Othered; one must merely possess a characteristic which sets one apart from others, and which they feel entitled to use against one. This insight may have been lost on Elizabethan theatregoers who simply wanted to boo a villain and enjoy Shakespeare’s rather colourful insults, but that does not mean that it did not exist. It may subsequently have been lost as an insight into the behaviour of a disabled character for several reasons: non-disabled people’s behaviour towards disabled people often goes unquestioned and unnoticed; a perception that there is nothing to say about disability, and so on.   The play opens with Richard III bemoaning his own fate, and this is certainly a more comforting idea for most people – that disability discrimination is somehow less wrong because the disabled person is suffering primarily from the torment of differing from the norm anyway. The modern idea of the social model of disability challenges this, by saying that people are disabled by society’s failure to accommodate them – for example by being sent a letter in an inaccessible format when one is visually impaired, or being unable to get into a station – or the part of a station which one needs – because one is a wheelchair user and the platform can only be reached via a flight of steps. It is ignorant to assume that the social model existed in an era which ended with the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, when it was in fact not suggested until the 1970s. 

In his article in Disability Arts Online, Jeff Wilson gives the example of various non-disabled actors who have played Richard III, and argues that they tend to be extremely athletic, which does not suggest that they really had mobility impairments. (Wilson, 2022,2) On the other hand, the impairment that Richard III is thought to have had – a type of spinal curvature called scoliosis – would apparently not have prevented success on the battlefield and would not have been visible once he was wearing armour. (Vincent-Connolly, 2021,145).

This leaves two questions unanswered. Firstly, was Richard III actually disabled, or was that just a claim made to discredit him? Secondly, what significance does the question have today? 

In answer to the first question, when the skeleton was excavated from its resting-place in the car park in Leicester in September 2012, it was shown that it did indeed have a spinal curvature. It was pronounced, but as it was well-balanced, would probably have resulted in little physical disfigurement, and the fact that the bones of both legs were well-developed suggests that Richard III would probably not have walked with a limp. (Appleby et al, 2014, 1944). Not quite the person described by William Shakespeare and Thomas More.  

In answer to the second question, there has been a persistent perception that Richard III’s reputation needed rehabilitating, but this has not always related to a feeling of fellowship with him due to a real or imputed disability. For example, the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third was published in 1768 and seems to have been much more preoccupied with the idea that Richard III’s bad reputation was based on the continued failure robustly to interrogate sources which, like Sir Thomas More’s biography of Richard III, were themselves deeply flawed. On the other hand, Philippa Langley seems only to have started looking for Richard III’s remains after she discovered that she felt that they had both been looked down upon because of a perceived disability. In addition, The Lost King relates Langley’s unhappiness with a scoliosis specialist’s tendency to describe Richard III as a ‘hunchback’ – a word which Langley does not explain her dislike of, except to call it “that awful word” which she thought “had been discarded”. (Langley, 2022, 170). She gives the impression of somebody who takes the description of someone else far too personally, but one might suggest that it is bound up with her feelings of kinship towards Richard III, and also with her experiences of feeling judged and improperly understood by the medical profession in particular. In addition, she says that she thought that the word ‘hunchback’ had been discarded. This could be a reference to the controversy surrounding the 1996 Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, based on Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre Dame of Paris. Disney’s decision to use the word ‘hunchback’ to describe the famous character of Quasimodo was among the aspects of the film which were criticized; some disability activists claimed that using the word was pejorative and that it raised various problems which it  made little attempt to solve – chiefly that small children were (allegedly) afraid of the Quasimodo character, something which Disney’s attempts to make him less frightening had not solved, as his character might still cause small children to recoil, and refer to disabled people in general as ‘hunchbacks’. In addition, the film gave the impression that all disabled people were physically unattractive. (Knight-Ridder, 1996) One of Disney’s executives, Peter Schneider, said that they ‘had’ to use the word, but it is unclear why he thought that Disney was so powerless that it could not have avoided using a contentious word, particularly as the film’s advertisement posters made no mention of Victor Hugo (something which angered Hugo’s descendants), and the book is often known as Notre Dame of Paris anyway. (Strauss, 1996)

‘Nobody tweaks the Bard’

I came across this claim a few months ago, made in a television drama by a character directing a Shakespeare play, and I thought it was ridiculous. Everyone tweaks the Bard. Well, not everyone, obviously. A significant number of people have, though, whether in terms of changing the era or the location of one of Shakespeare’s plays to make a point, and Shakespeare is often known as ‘The Bard of Avon’ to reflect this. As far as disability is concerned, the most recent ‘tweak’ is the 2024 production of Richard III which starred Michelle Terry in the title role and had a cast that was exclusively female or non-binary. Despite its commitment to other kinds of modern concerns (in addition to its casting, the play explored ideas of toxic masculinity), it seemed clear from a Q & A session with two cast members (Helen Schlesinger and Katie Erich) that I went to as part of a Richard III study day at the Globe Theatre in London in August 2024 that the cast rather felt that the controversy surrounding Terry’s decision to erase Richard III’s disability had rained on their parade. As one cast member, Katie Erich, used British Sign Language, and brought a British Sign Language interpreter along to the Q & A, it was surprising that, unlike Philippa Langley, she seemed to feel no solidarity with Richard. It may have been that Erich viewed herself as a member of a linguistic minority rather than as a disabled person, and she may simply have seen British Sign Language as something which enabled her to do her job without the necessity of having to lip-read her colleagues as well. It seems that one thing to consider is that seeing disability as a purely individual phenomenon helps to encourage the idea that no ethical questions arise from it.

Dr Emmeline Burdett is an independent researcher.

_____________________

References:
Appleby et al. ‘The scoliosis of Richard III, last Plantagenet King of England, diagnosis and clinical significance’, The Lancet, 2014 (vol.383), p. 1944.
British Library, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/richard-iii-portrait-with-overpaint-c-1504-20
Langley, P. and Jones, M. (2022) The Lost King: The Search for Richard III. John Murray.
Sher, A. (1985). Year of the King. Nick Hern Books.
Shakespeare, W. (2000). The Tragedy of King Richard III. Oxford World’s Classics.
Strauss, Bob. ‘Courting controversy? Disney’s Newest Animated Feature, ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Takes On Sensitive Adult Issues’, (1996), Sunday, June 23rd.
Vincent-Connolly, P. (2021). Disability and the Tudors: All the King’s Fools. Pen and Sword Books.
Wilson, J. ‘Cripping Richard III’. Disability Arts Online, (2022), October 3rd.
Wolfe Knight-Ridder, Kathi, ‘Another Burden for the Disabled’, The Spokesman Review, (1996), Wednesday, July 3rd.
 

Recommended citation: Emmeline Burdett (2025): "Thou lump of foul deformity". Richard III, William Shakespeare, and The Lost King. In: Public Disability History 10 (2025) 3.

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Disability history in the classroom – the LETHE-project

By Sebastian Barsch & Andreas Hübner

Disability History is not only an academic subject. The question of the social construction of disability also raises fundamental questions about how power is distributed in a society, how normality and abnormality are defined and how definitions change over time. Disability history can thus also enrich the teaching of history by providing children with perspectives on history, power and powerlessness that have been largely neglected.

However, in the few cases where teaching materials on the history of disability exist, there are often two problems: firstly, people with disabilities are often portrayed only as victims. Secondly, the history of dealing with disability is often presented as a success story, for example, when discussing positive developments in social services and the inclusion of disabled people in society. And yes, this is important too! It is important to show that the situation of people with disabilities has often been one of suffering, of exclusion and murder. So learners also need to learn about these terrible aspects of history, to deal with them, to understand their emotions and to work with them. This is also done in the hope that learning from history will be achieved and that young people will be empowered to take a stand against exclusion in the present. It is also important to address the fact that the situation for people with disabilities may well have improved, depending on the time and region. To ignore this is to ignore part of history.

However, this approach is also too simplistic. What is missing from the teaching of history in schools is a multi-perspective approach to disability. Questions can be asked: Has the history of disability always been one of exclusion? Have 'we' really come so far? What agency have people with disabilities experienced at different times and in different regions? Where do they appear as actors in history? Which stories remain hidden in official curricula and national narratives? And how can these “invisible” histories help foster a multi-perspective approach to the past?

These are the key questions explored by LETHE – (e-)Learning the Invisible History of Europe through Material Culture, a portal funded by the European Union. While LETHE is not solely focused on disability history, but rather on overlooked histories in general, the core question remains the same: How can we bring hidden narratives to light?

To do so, LETHE introduces, among others, a “hidden” disability history that leads students on a journey tracing the monument of the Grey Buses in Ravensburg, Baden Wuerttemberg. The Grey Buses Monument commemorates the victims of National Socialist euthanasia and the so-called “T4 Program”. The euthanasia program meant to systematically eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered “life unworthy of life”: those persons who the Nazi regime deemed as psychiatric, neurological, or physical disable. Yet, being deemed “unworthy of life” or “disable” by the Nazi regime was not about a person’s “abilities”, but it was a means of a specialized language that dehumanized victims. The “T4 Program,” named after the address of the central control center at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, initiated a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia. Beginning in 1939, this systematically organized extermination program marked the industrial-scale killing of vulnerable individuals in Nazi Germany.

Based on the Grey Buses Monument, students delve into the hidden history of how disability was problematically managed in both German states. By studying prominent figures from the West German disability movement, such as Franz Christoph, they gain valuable insights into the agency of people with disabilities and learn to place this agency within a historical context. Engaging with these hidden histories, students come to understand how individuals who were once marginalized can be empowered to emerge as active agents in shaping their own narratives.

In this, LETHE addresses the experience of victimisation in the story. But it does not stop there. The central question for the teaching materials here is how continuity and change, cause and effect have manifested themselves in different times and regions in relation to the phenomenon of disability. Through the stories of victims, stories of self-determined participation are also told. For example, under the economically difficult conditions of socialism in the GDR (Link zu behinderung-ddr.de einfügen) , people acquired aids to increase their own mobility and thus created accessibility where the political administration did not provide for it. But the discovery of the skeleton of a child with Down's syndrome from the 5th and 6th centuries, with an elaborate burial ritual, also raises the question of whether disabled people have always been marginalized.

Screenshot from the LETHE-project teaching material on disabilities.

What these examples show is that a complex phenomenon like disability cannot be treated in a less complex way, because history is not less complex and human societies are even less so. But what is also crucial in dealing with the phenomenon of disability is the question of how students can be actively involved and how they can generate their own questions and form their own judgements within this multi-perspective view of disability, in order to gain orientation for their own lives.

Perhaps it is precisely these examples, away from the usual master narratives, that are suitable to illustrate the real diversity of historical and contemporary societies and to get young people actively involved in a discussion about how we want to live in the present without (again) excluding certain groups. Given the current global political situation, this seems more important than ever.

Link to the LETHE-website:
https://letheproject.eu/

Sebastian Barsch is professor for history education at the University of Cologne, Germany. His work and research interests focus among others on inclusive history education. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6715-1466

Andreas Hübner is Senior Lecturer in History Education at Kiel University. His teaching and research focus on global history, history didactics, the Anthropocene and environmental studies. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3885-4429 

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Recommended citation: Sebastian Barsch & Andreas Hübner (2025): Disability history in the classroom – the LETHE-project. In: Public Disability History 10 (2025) 2.

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The "Counter-Monument" of the Grey Buses: Emotion Networking as a Method for Public Disability History

By Janneke van der Heide & Jan-Christian Wilkening

Introduction

Remembering the crimes committed against people with disabilities during the Nazi era as part of the T4 program is organized in many ways in Germany. Exhibitions and memorial sites are an integral part of this culture of remembrance, as are monuments commemorating the victims of the National Socialist regime in Germany. One of these monuments is the Monument of the Grey Buses. Designed by the artists Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz and originally erected in Ravensburg in Germany in 2006, a stylistically identical Wanderdenkmal [moving monument] was created shortly after. Said Wanderdenkmal has continuously been changing its location and has been temporarily installed across 16 different German cities since its creation. The goal of both the permanently installed and moving monument is the same, namely to commemorate the more than 200,000 victims of the T4 action organized between 1940 and 1941. Grey buses of the Gemeinnützige Krankentransportgesellschaft GmbH [non-profit patient transport company] transported victims to various extermination camps in the German Reich, where they were systematically murdered (Hamm, 2005; Henke, 2008).
The possibilities for engaging with the Monument of the Grey Buses are diverse and have already been the subject of publications (e.g. Müller et al., 2017, for a more general approach towards the theory of memory culture see e. g. Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995). In the following remarks, we would like to focus on emotion networking as a specific method that we believe is suitable for using said monument (and others) to initiate historical learning processes in the context of public disability history. Therefore, we will first give insights into Aktion T4, to the Monument of the Grey Buses, and to its importance for public disability history in Germany. Then, the method of emotion networking will be introduced and it will be explained how this approach can be used to critically reflect on monuments that commemorate people with disabilities. We will conclude with some further thoughts on the relevance of emotion networking for the remembrance of people with disabilities who fell victim to the National Socialist regime in Germany.

Remembering the Perpetrators and Victims of Aktion T4

August 18th 2024 marked the eighty-fifth anniversary of the order of the National Socialist regime in Germany to have allegedly inferior children systematically murdered; an order that was later extended to adults under the name Aktion T4, an order that symbolizes the crimes of National Socialism like no other singular event (Schlebach, 2024). The “euthanasia” program was the culmination of a Nazi social policy aimed at the exclusion and extermination of allegedly inferior life. It was designed to target all people who, according to the regime's understanding, were abnormal, dangerous to the public, incapable of working, or in need of permanent care (Aly, 2014). In addition to the almost 200,000 people who were murdered in the course of Aktion T4, there were 400,000 people who were forcibly sterilized in accordance with the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses [Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring], a law created to prevent alleged hereditary diseases, which was passed on January 1st, 1934. These victims did not conform to the Nationalist Socialists' ideas of racial hygiene and were therefore to be neutralized (Klee, 2001). The National Socialist government had abandoned the traditional system of reference, which placed the individual person at the center of medical, preventive, and rehabilitative efforts, in favor of the health of the Volksgemeinschaft, and therefore cemented eugenic patterns of thought (Thümmel, 2003). Eugenic thinking has its origins in the nineteenth century and had already been critically discussed in the Weimar Republic after the publication of the essay "Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens" ["Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life"] (1920) by the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. However, it had never been put to practice during that time and was only fully implemented on the political stage during the Nazi regime (Staudinger, 1999; Bezenhöfer, 2009).
The Monument of the Grey Buses is a reminder of Aktion T4 (image 1). Not only in one place, but rather (temporarily) in several German cities that are connected to the mass murder of people with disabilities. For example, the memorial has previously been placed in Berlin's Tiergartenstrasse (2008), from where the T4 operation was coordinated. Further, it has been placed in front of various former killing centres where the victims were brought to in the grey busses – such as in Pirna (2010) or Hadamar (2018) – to be murdered systematically.

Image 1 - Original Monument of the Grey Buses in Ravensburg. Credit: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denkmal_der_Grauen_Busse, last accessed on 05.12.2024

The Monument of the Grey Buses was designed by the two artists Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz, who see the memorial as a place of remembrance for perpetrators and victims alike:

“However, the design is not only intended to commemorate the victims of the ‘euthanasia’ campaign, the deed and the perpetrators are also reflected in the bus as a memorial. The artists use the grey buses as a means of transporting memories, so to speak.” (Stadt Ravensburg, 2006 [our translation])

Hoheisel and Knitz themselves describe their monument as a counter-monument (NRW Skulptur, n. d.). According to Quentin Stevens, Karen A. Franck and Ruth Fazakerley, counter-monuments can be distinguished from conventional monuments in terms of subject, form, site, visitor, experience and meaning (Stevens et al., 2012). While conventional monuments commemorate famous people in a country, counter-monuments aim to focus primarily on the history of victims, as Stevens and colleagues explain (ibid., p. 955). In addition, the authors argue, counter-monuments have a rather abstract form, are inconspicuously integrated into their surroundings, evoke a “close, bodily encounter by the visitors” and do not allow a uniform interpretation:

“Anti-monumental approaches … , offer no easy answers. They remain ambiguous and resist any unified interpretation; their meanings are often dependent on visitors’ historical knowledge, or supplementary information made available through signs, brochures, guides or interpretive centres.” (ibid., p. 961)

The Monument of the Grey Buses represents a valuable source for people interested in public disability history for two reasons. Firstly, the intended discussions and reflections on the crimes committed against people with disabilities during the Nazi era as well as their after-effects and significance for the present are not limited to only one location. Rather, the traveling counter-monument enables historical discussions around groups of perpetrators and victims in different places across Germany. This can be considered to be important for Germany as there is still a need to shed more light on the crimes committed against people with disabilities during the Nazi era. For example, only recently, Lebenshilfe e. V., an advocacy group for people with intellectual disabilities, called for the victims of Aktion T4 to be recognized as victims of persecution (Lebenshilfe, 2023). The travelling monument can also act as a starting point for explicitly initiated historical learning processes from which pupils, students and other historically interested people alike can benefit. In recent years, various considerations have been made and materials have been created that deal with the (extracurricular) thematization of monuments in Germany (Dräger, 2021; Dräger, 2022). Whether or to what extent memorials that deal with the history of people with disabilities during the Nazi era should be specifically addressed was just as little a subject of discussion as was the question of the extent to which special methodological approaches would have to be developed in order to be able to convincingly come to terms with the Nazi crimes against people with disabilities with the help of memorials in learning communities.

Emotion Networking in Public Disability History

Dealing with the history of the National Socialist regime is often emotional, especially (but not only) in Germany. Anger, sadness, fear and disgust are just some of the emotions that can be triggered by confronting the crimes of the Nazis. When monuments in public history are in some shape or form connected with the National Socialist regime, like the Wanderdenkmal of the Grey Buses, the method of emotion networking offers a possibility to share emotions and knowledge about monuments in a structured way. Although an unstructured confrontation with one's own emotions does not have to be fundamentally bad, it seems necessary to us to at least think about structured procedures for historical learning in and outside of schools in order to prevent learners from becoming overwhelmed and traumatized.
Emotion networking is inspired by the ‘Circumplex Model of Emotion’ by the American psychologist James Russell (1980) and was developed around 2020 by Hester Dibbits of the Amsterdam Reinwardt Academy and Marlous Willemsen of the Amsterdam Institute ImagineIC (Dibbits, 2020). The activity can be organized both on paper and in space in a group setting. When emotion networking on paper, participants position their emotion(s) as a point in a circle along two dimensions of valence and arousal. By emotion networking in space (like in a classroom or in a public space), the participants gather around the object, showing their emotion by choosing a relative position towards the heritage object. The point of a personal emotional stance can be made visible by stepping forward or backward, or by putting images of emoji’s in front of them.
In October 2024, a group of 20 international students in an ERASMUS+ course on ‘Heritage Education’, organized by the University of Cologne (Germany), University of Leiden (Netherlands), the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands) and the Linnaeus University (Sweden), visited the Monument of the Grey Buses in Cologne. They were asked to stand around the object to position themselves emotionally and to choose one or two out of six emoji’s (ranging from angry and sad, to neutral and optimistic) that best expressed their emotions. Strong(er) feelings were expressed by putting the chosen emoji’s close to the heritage item, whilst weak(er) feelings were expressed by putting the chosen emoji’s further away (image 2). 

Image 2 - Schematic situation of emotion networking in space. Credit: www.emotienetwerken.nl, last accessed on 05.12.2024

We then asked the participants, following the protocol of the method, to voluntarily share and explain their position and feelings. One student responded that the experienced emotion was strong, because of the hard concrete the bus is made from, and that this represented in her eyes the harshness of the historical event to which it referred (image 3). Another student suggested that the size of the windows of the bus reflected the personal scale of the victims, as was the phrase that is carved in the stone in the midst of the bus: ‘Wohin bringt Ihr uns?’ [Where are you taking us?]. Another student expressed weak feelings towards the heritage object, not feeling any particular emotion in front of a – in her opinion – log and unwieldy concrete bus. Yet, most of the students felt affected by the senses when looking into the aisle down the middle of the bus, which is actually split in two parts. Striking and causing emotion for some students was that this particular aisle is suitable for wheelchairs, which made the connection of the impaired of past and present heartfelt. The particular geographical position of the monument did raise eyebrows, questioning the symbolic meaning of the perfect ‘see through’ from the aisle of the Monument on the Cologne Cathedral.
 

Image 3 - A group of international students at the Monument of the Grey Buses in Cologne. Credit: Picture of the authors, taken in October 2024

While the participants share their emotional arguments for choosing a particular spot around the heritage item, interruption is not allowed, as emotion networking is an exercise in listening to each other. After the interactions of emotions, emotion networking requires that knowledge is added by means of information about various stakeholders that are involved in the particular heritage. In a classroom setting, this knowledge is usually added by showing information sheets or slides or showing short videos of different people who represent multiple perspectives (Dibbits, 2020). When emotion networking in a particular space, such as at the Monument of the Grey Buses, information about stakeholders can be communicated by telling. In this case the used stakeholders were the disabled victims of the “euthanasia” policy of the Nazi regime, the relatives of the disabled victims of the “euthanasia” policy, the perpetrators like the managers of the institutions involved and doctors, the Nazi regime as such, the German population as such in wartime and postwar period, and the disabled patients and their relatives nowadays. After the sharing of knowledge by means of stakeholders to get a multiperspective view, the students can adjust their emotional position if their feelings have changed. Again, positions and arguments are then exchanged without interruptions from other participants. The question is if the awareness of multiple perspectives has redirected the emotions. Finally, to conclude the method of emotion networking, a short discussion can be instigated about the question ‘What has this exercise taught you about (this particular) heritage?’ (ibid.)
Emotion networking shows the complexity of different individual emotional stances and prevents the sometimes persistent bipolarity of collective emotional stances towards the heritage object. At the same time, it acknowledges that emotions may change by interacting and adding multiple perspectives and can be defined as dynamic. Thus, emotion networking provides insights into the interactions between the participants, as well as between the participants and the heritage item. (ibid.)
The overall goal of emotion networking around a sensitive heritage item, is – in the words of the developers Dibbits and Willemsen – to become “heritage wise”: acquiring “a competence that enables people to critically relate to heritage and discuss it, by paying attention to the social dynamics surrounding heritage and their own and others’ position in relationship to it” (ibid.). Whether the central item is a sensitive object in public disability history, or a sensitive social or historical topic to discuss in your history class, emotions are channeled by the structured form of the method, and by means of keeping a balance between individual emotion and knowledge of multiple perspectives.  

Conclusion

Memorials in Germany that exclusively commemorate Aktion T4 are rare. This makes it all the more important to consider how these few memorials can be used to provide learners with access to the history of people with disabilities under the Nazi regime. The emotion networking method seems suitable for discussing and reflecting on emotions triggered by monuments such as the Monument of the Grey Buses. Particularly in view of the emotional nature of the memory of the National Socialist regime, we believe that an examination of emotion networking would be beneficial in order to be able to use public disability history spaces as starting points for historical learning processes. We cannot answer how sustainable or effective emotion networking was for the international students mentioned above. However, we would like to point out the overall positive feedback from the students, who largely rated the excursion to the Monument of the Grey Buses positively. Therefore, we are confident that not only students interested in heritage education would benefit from emotion networking, but also people around the world who are interested in facing their emotions when confronted with the public history of disability.

Janneke van der Heide is a cultural historian and history teacher affiliated with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. She completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam on the political and social impact of Darwinism in the Netherlands (1859–1909). Her research interests include the reception of Darwin’s ideas and history education, and she has published in several edited volumes on the cultural reception of Darwin in Europe. Since 2008, she has taught courses on heritage education, cultural history, and the philosophy of history.

Jan-Christian Wilkening is working as a research assistant in the Department of History Education at the University of Cologne. He just defended his PhD thesis on “Historical Thinking and Learning of Students with Intellectual Disabilities: Participatory Practices of an Inclusive History Education”. His research primarily focuses on inclusive history education, public history, and historical thinking.

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References:
Assmann, J. & Czaplicka, J.: Collective Memory and Cultural Identity, in: New German Critique 65 (1995), S. 125-133.
Aly, G.: Die Belasteten. „Euthanasie“ 1939-1945. Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Frankfurt/M. 2014.
Bezenhöfer, U.: Der gute Tod? Geschichte der Euthanasie und Sterbehilfe, 2. ed., Göttingen 2009.
Dibbits, H.: Emotienetwerken: erfgoed- en burgerschapseducatie in de 21 eeuw, in: Cultuur + Educatie 19 (2020), pp. 8–26.
Dräger, M.: Denkmäler im Geschichtsunterricht thematisieren. Frankfurt/M. 2022.
Dräger, M.: Denkmäler im Geschichtsunterricht. Frankfurt/M. 2021.
Hamm, M. (Ed.): Lebensunwert – zerstörtes Leben. Zwangsterilisation und „Euthanasie“, Frankfurt/M. 2005.
Henke, K.-D. (Ed.): Tödliche Medizin im Nationalsozialismus. Von der Rassenhygiene zum Massenmord, Köln 2008.
Klee, E.: Deutsche Medizin im Dritten Reich. Karriere vor und nach 1945, Frankfurt/M. 2001.
Lebenshilfe: Von den Nazis ermordete Menschen mit Behinderung werden zu Opfern zweiter Klasse gemacht, URL: https://www.lebenshilfe.de/presse/pressemeldung/von-den-nazis-ermordete-menschen-mit-behinderung-werden-zu-opfern-zweiter-klasse-gemacht?srsltid=AfmBOoo3zTAxQZW8boV0aTi6lU0UB_3L4f8sCNSLI9W58GeXH2WII3X7 [last accessed on 11.12.2024].
Müller, T. / Schmidt-Michel, Paul-Otto / Schwarzbauer, F. / Hoheisel, H. (Ed.): Vergangen? Spurensuche und Erinnerungsarbeit - das Denkmal der Grauen Busse, Zwiefalten 2017.
NRW Skulptur: Denkmal der Grauen Busse, URL: https://nrw-skulptur.net/skulptur/denkmal-der-grauen-busse/ [last accessed on 11.12.2024].
Schlebach, A.: Euthanasie. „Rassenhygiene“ der Nationalsozialisten, in: NDR [online], URL:    https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/Euthanasie-Rassenhygiene-im- Nationalsozialismus,euthanasie100.html [last accessed on 11.12.2024].
Stadt Ravensburg: Mahnmal Weißenau, URL: http://www.dasdenkmaldergrauenbusse.de/images/files/Standorte/Weissenau/WeissenauBroschuere.pdf [last accessed on 11.12.2024].
Staudinger, R.:  Rassenrecht und Rassenstaat. Die nationalsozialistische   Vision eines „biologisch totalen Staates“, Tirol 1999.
Stevens, Q. / Franck, K. / Fazakerley, R.: Counter-monuments: The Anti-monumental and the Dialogic, in: The Journal of Architecture 17 (2012), 6, pp. 951–972.
Thümmel, I.: Sozial- und Ideengeschichte der Schule für Geistigbehinderte im 20. Jahrhundert. Zentrale Entwicklungslinien zwischen Ausgrenzung und Partizipation, Berlin 2003.

 

Recommended citation: Janneke van der Heide & Jan-Christian Wilkening (2025): The "Counter-Monument" of the Grey Buses: Emotion Networking as a Method for Public Disability History. In: Public Disability History 10 (2025) 1.

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Bearly Inspirational: Florence Attwood and Mavis Rendle

By Emmeline Burdett

A lot of the information in this blog is based on a Merrythought blog post about Florence Attwood, and on sources kindly supplied by Merrythought, including an article entitled ‘A Deaf Toy Designer’, by Doreen Woodford, which was originally published in the Deaf History Journal in August 2002.

Photograph of Florence Attwood 1907-1952

Florence Attwood, or ‘Florrie’ for short, was one of the earliest designers for the English soft toy company Merrythought, and she designed all the 32 characters which appeared in its first catalogue, published in 1931 (Merrythought itself having been founded in 1930).

A 1930s merrythought teddy bear

Attwood was born on 24th July 1907 at Dawley in Shropshire, England. She caught measles when she was two years old, and, as a result, she became deaf. In common with her brothers and sisters, she seems to have attended Ketley County Infants’ School for two years, before being admitted to the Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester, England, on 31st May 1915. Following the opening of the school’s Henry Worrall Training Centre for Elder Girls in March 1923, Attwood trained in its Dressmaking Department, and in 1926, she began work at Chad Valley, another soft toy manufacturer, at a rate of sixteen shillings per week. Chad Valley’s Production Manager, Clifton James Rendle, had a daughter called Mavis, who was also a pupil at the Manchester Royal School for the Deaf and had had some brief contact with Attwood, despite being eleven years younger. It may be that Rendle suggested that Attwood channel her creativity into designing toys, and/or helped her get employment at Chad Valley. In any event, when Rendle was asked to join a new firm – Merrythought – Attwood was one of the employees that he took with him. Merrythought opened in 1930.

Photograph of the Henry Worrall training centre’s dressmaking department

Merrythought’s first catalogue was published in 1931, and included original designs as well as well-known characters, such as the dog Greyfriars Bobby, who allegedly spent fourteen years guarding his master’s grave in Edinburgh, Scotland, until his death in January 1872. Attwood also designed various pandas for Merrythought, mostly after London Zoo’s acquisition, in 1939, of a panda named Ming. In 1949, Attwood also designed a bear named Punkinhead for the Canadian department store Eaton’s. This was one of the last designs she ever did, for she died of cancer in 1952 at the age of only 44.

Attwood and Deafness

Both the Merrythought Blog and Doreen Woodford’s article in the Deaf History Journal agree that Attwood discovered her talent for creativity during her time at the Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester, and specifically in the Dressmaking Department of the Henry Worrall Training Centre. [the Centre is also sometimes called a Training School, so I use the terms interchangeably]. This challenges the idea, popular amongst disability activists, that the only thing that mainstream society has ever tried to do is to suppress disabled people, often by preventing them from reaching their potential and then complaining that they are a useless waste of money. For example, in her chapter on school education in the 2014 book Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide, Dawn Benson argues that the extent and quality of disabled children’s education has been entirely dependent on the disability movement.

This does rather suggest that nobody else could be relied upon to ensure that a disabled child received a meaningful education, whereas the example of the Henry Worrall Training School suggests that the picture may be somewhat more nuanced. The fact that the Training School was ‘for Elder Girls’ and the fact that it had a Dressmaking Department suggest that the girls were being trained for traditionally female occupations but does not necessarily say anything about deafness. An article which was published in the journal The Teacher of the Deaf in April 1923 took pains to emphasise that many of first intake of girls to the Henry Worrall Training Centre “had the great advantage of starting their ordinary education early in life, between 5 and 6 years of age”, but it is unclear what this means, and whether it relates to the girls’ ability to communicate orally, as opposed to using sign language. It is not known how much oral speech Attwood managed to acquire, as she became deaf when she was learning to talk. By the time she worked at Merrythought, Attwood communicated by using sign language and fingerspelling, as well as by reading what other workers wrote down.

Attwood as an “Inspiration”

The Merrythought blog post about Florence Attwood describes how she “inspirationally overcame the many challenges associated with being deaf and unable to speak”. Though this suggests that not all the ‘challenges’ in question may have been a direct result of Attwood’s deafness, to describe disabled people as ‘inspirational’ (or a related term, such as ‘wonderful’) is a common, and rather unhelpful, response to impairment. Apart from the rather flippant point that no-one designs toys with their ears (and thus that, seen from this point of view, Attwood was not at a disadvantage), describing a disabled person as ‘inspirational’ rather obscures the reality of disability. For example, in a TED talk in 2014, the late Stella Young related how, when she was fifteen years old, an acquaintance had asked her parents if he could nominate her for a Community Achievement Award.

Young’s parents pointed out that Young had not achieved anything. In saying this, they were not casting aspersions upon their daughter, but rather pointing out that nominating her for an award for being disabled was really rather patronising. By contrast, Attwood had achieved something. Although she had been given a helping hand, the fact that she had become a successful and imaginative toy designer was entirely due to her own abilities. So, is the Merrythought Blog right to describe her as ‘inspirational’?

The article in the Deaf History Journal also tells the story (insofar as it is known) of Mavis Rendle, who had been the fellow pupil whom Attwood had mentored upon her arrival at The Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester, despite their eleven-year age difference. Rendle had become deaf at the age of five months in 1919, as a result of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919. When she was five years old, her parents had sent her to the Royal Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Margate, England, but when, fifteen months later, her father got a new job in Shropshire, the local Education Authority decided that Mavis should be transferred to the Royal School for the Deaf in Manchester. Like Attwood, she had trained at the Henry Worrall Training Centre, but appears not to have flourished as Attwood did, with the only thing known for certain about her future life is that she and her mother met her father for lunch every day for some years at a nearby hotel.

It may be that Rendle had no interest or aptitude for the trade that had been chosen for her. However, having apparently washed their hands of her when she was five years old, it seems that Rendle’s parents (in particular, her mother) belatedly clung to her like limpets, and one wonders if the lunch arrangement was something that any of them actually enjoyed. It is noteworthy that Mavis’s father helped Attwood, a schoolfellow of his daughter’s and, though he may not have been in a position to offer the same assistance to his daughter, one wonders whether he did try to help her and, if so, what form this help took. In addition, the article in the Deaf History Journal highlights the isolation of many deaf people at the time but does not state whether this was portrayed as being a natural consequence of deafness, or a result of the deaf person’s circumstances. One wonders how typical Rendle’s experience, of having her own parents and an education authority decide that she should, twice in early childhood, be uprooted from everything she knew, contributed to this isolation. In addition, it is difficult to avoid contrasting Attwood’s life, which, although it was cut short, seems to have been successful and fulfilled, with Mavis Rendle’s. of which it is not so easy to make such statements. It may be that Rendle’s parents were, by figuring so prominently in her adult life, attempting to protect her from the isolation and lack of opportunity to which she was perhaps considered to be prone, but it may have been that the causes of her vulnerability were misidentified. So-called ‘boarding-school syndrome’ was only identified in 2011 and was described by its identifier as “a set of lasting psychological problems observable in adults who, as children, were sent away from their home at an early age to boarding schools” (Moore 2021) but it does have a bearing on Mavis Rendle’s situation, particularly in terms of having been sent away from home at the age of only five. As many commentators have identified, being sent away to school has a long history in Britain (see for example Emma Jacobs, ‘Lessons in Britishness’, Financial Times).

In addition, it is often the case that anything that happens to disabled people is interpreted as having a therapeutic or otherwise benign purpose, making it more difficult to criticize or complain about. This suffocating insistence on the benignity of everyone else’s intentions was part of the reason why the disability rights movement was slower to get going than movements based on race or gender, for example, but also makes it difficult to discuss things which, if they happened to another section of society, would be unquestionably seen as wrong (Knittel 2015). It may be that Rendle’s life was happy but largely undocumented, but as Stella Young pointed out in her TED talk, “Being disabled doesn’t make you exceptional. Questioning what you think you know about it does”.

This is why it is not sufficient to describe someone like Florence Attwood as ‘inspirational’, because, however impressive her achievements, setting them in context by, for example, discussing another deaf person who lived at the same time, such as Mavis Rendle, helps avoid ‘inspiration porn’, which, to quote from Stella Young’s TED talk again, is to “objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people”. This in turn helps avoid problems such as the assumption that things which happened to disabled people simply ‘because they were disabled’ and are not worth discussing.

References

• Dawn Benson, Education (School) in Cameron, C. (ed.) Disability Studies: A Student’s Guide (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 50.
• Susanne Knittel, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 41. Knittel gives the example of Giorgio Agamben’s book Homo Sacer, and its problematic idea that the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme was in better faith than the rest of the Nazi genocide. Although this is an extreme example, it does serve to demonstrate how the idea of ‘being cruel to be kind’ is in some ways particularly acceptable to society as a whole when applied to disabled people.
• Charlotte Moore, “So, what is Boarding School Syndrome?”, Cosmopolitan, 29th November 2021, unpaged.
• Doreen Woodford, ‘A Deaf Toy Designer’, reprint of an article featured in the Deaf History Journal, vol.6, no.1 (August 2002), pp.35-42. Published by the British Deaf History Society.

Recommended citation

Emmeline Burdett (2024): Bearly Inspirational: Florence Attwood and Mavis Rendle. In: Public Disabilitiy History 9 (2024) 1.

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The Forgotten Room of the association Valentin Haüy in Paris, or How to Build an Inclusive Digitisation Project on the History of Blindness

By Céline Roussel & Marion Chottin

Rediscovering Maurice de la Sizeranne’s Cultural Project

As Marion and I were exploring for our academic research – for CNRS-projects on the one hand, for a doctoral thesis at Paris-Sorbonne on the other – the field of disability studies, with a focus on blindness related to philosophy, literature, and other arts, we made the acquaintance of Noëlle Roy, curator of the museum and library in the Association Valentin Haüy from 2000 to 2017. She led us into a very special room, the “salle Heimann” (“Heimann room”), which houses the great oeuvre of Maurice de la Sizeranne (1857-1924): a huge, rich, unique collection of books, writings and all kinds of documents reflecting on blindness throughout the centuries.

Maurice de la Sizeranne was a blind intellectual who, in the year 1889, founded the Association in the memory of Valentin Haüy. Haüy (1745-1822) was a French polymath who had founded the first school for blind young people, the Institute for Blind Youth ((INJA) in Paris in 1785. Maurice de la Sizeranne belongs to an influential generation of French blind people who became conscious of the importance of culture as a powerful way of achieving greater integration in the dominant sighted society. The museum and the library, both created just before the Association was born, were the fundamental pillar of this vision. They aimed at the intellectual emancipation of blind people by their own means, in accordance with Haüy’s teachings. Marion and I soon felt how much the library was inhabited by the spirits of both men and was the crossroads of countless others who were only waiting to be discovered, read, and heard again. Amongst them were Milton, Maria-Theresia von Paradis, Helen Keller, Borges, Taha Hussein; or Louis Vierne, Axel Munthe, Marie Lenéru, Cécile Douard, Olga Skorokhodova… 

Our visits in this library, which began in 2016 and are ongoing, has gradually revealed to us what marvellous the treasures the library contains, and how many different fields are represented - humanities, medicine, cultural and institutional history, pedagogy, literature, theatre, poetry… Every document deals with blindness, and they have been written by both blind and sighted people, by academics and laypersons. The number of languages represented is similarly impressive - documents not only in French, but in many foreign languages form part of the collections. But our visits had shown how even those familiar with the Association were unaware of the treasures contained within this library, and sometimes even unaware that it existed at all! When Noëlle Roy retired in 2017 (and was awarded the “grade de Chevalier de l’ordre national du Mérite” in June 2018 for her commitment in the Association), the future of these precious collections suddenly became uncertain, and Marion and I proposed our services as volunteers to keep them accessible to international researchers.

The Paradox of the Forgotten Room

A visit to the United States in the autumn of 2017 in connection with my doctoral research led me to several of the most important institutions for the education and history of blind people in America: the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, near Boston, the American Foundation for the Blind in New York, the Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky. All these institutions were engaged in digitising and publishing their archives at different scales (subsidised projects; in-house digitisation according to the needs of readers; or publications on archives.org: see the links and references below). Their collections convinced me that Marion and I should take charge of the digitisation and scientific edition of the library of the Association Valentin Haüy in Paris.

Another issue also troubled us. This library houses cultural treasures, unique and essential to the understanding of blindness, written by both blind and sighted people: correspondence, press clippings, magazines, manuscripts, valuable books… But all this material is typed or handwritten in ordinary script and not in Braille. How can it be accessible to blind or partially sighted people who wish make use of it without the support of a reader or guide? This library builds up a history page after page – that of access to culture for blind people, that of their full participation in society and their autonomy – but this is contradicted and undermined by the fact that the material contained in the library is in a format inaccessible to blind people, even though it is such an important resource for learning about the history of blind and visually impaired people. This is a paradox that we now have the material and technical possibility to resolve. It is vital that we do so:

“When I started to lose my sight due to congenital glaucoma, I felt the need to know how people who had become blind before me had been able to adapt to continue to read, work and participate in cultural or leisure activities, without forgetting the main thing, the adaptations to daily life. When I wanted to consult sources of information on blindness and testimonies of blind people, I only found a few published books, whereas precious testimonies exist in the heritage collection of the Association Valentin Haüy. Only digitisation can make them accessible, via the screen-reading software used by visually impaired people who cannot read so-called black writing, whether handwritten or printed. Thanks to this colossal work, we will finally be able to access writings never read by blind people or even by the general public. Moreover, the publication of this unique heritage collection online will help to raise awareness of visual impairment among the general public.”

Catherine Grimaud, retired, former employee for accessibility in the disability mission of a large company and volunteer in the actidv employment club of the apiDV association.

By the end of her career, Noëlle Roy had already succeeded in having the two most important reviews for the social and cultural history of blindness in France (the Louis Braille and the Valentin Haüy) digitised and published online on the Gallica website (Bibliothèque nationale de France). The result was nevertheless impaired by the unfortunately poor quality of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and by the lack of correction for the voice synthesis, which represents a significant barrier to accessing these documents if one cannot read text on a screen. This is a point that a digitisation project, as we understand it, has to improve in order to be fully accessible – even if it may still exist some language barriers (one has to understand German to read a source written in German!). Such a project would not only contribute to safeguarding some of these old and fragile collections (the big, brittle volumes which contain the press clippings for instance are an urgent priority); it would both benefit partially and non-sighted persons and contribute to preserving the heritage and cultural legacy of blind people.

Another precedent led us to think our aim was realistic: in France, the ArchAT project (2018-2021) led by Aude Déruelle, Professor of French literature at the University of Orléans, and with which the CNRS, among other institutions, is associated, digitised, digitally edited and put online the archives of the blind historian Augustin Thierry (1785-1856). The aim of the project was to provide a better understanding of, for instance, the working techniques of this major nineteenth-century blind intellectual figure (see the link below). I had the chance to participate to it, and Aude Déruelle herself recognized the value of the archival collection of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy as she paid a visit to the library, in order to find material about Augustin Thierry. The digitisation project of the collections of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy finally began in 2018 and now comprises around twenty people, including members of the Association Valentin Haüy, French and foreign scholars, and staff from the adaptation company L'Atelier de la Villette.

Overview of the Digitisation Project and of Three Collections in The Library

This project has been a challenge. Based on a partnership between the association Valentin Haüy, the ENS of Lyon and Sorbonne Université (Observatoire des textes, des idées et des corpus and Centre de Recherche en Littérature Comparée), it involves a long and demanding processing chain: indexing the collections according to a universal model as the one usually used in libraries and archives, proceeding with digitisation, OCR processing and structuring, upgrading to official digital accessibility standards (in France, the RGAA 4), writing academic explanatory notes… It will offer an academic presentation perfectly understandable by laypersons, and easily accessible to blind and non-blind readers, since each document will be screen-reader and Braille display compatible.

A numeral estimate of the contents of the library resulted in a figure of about 29500 items. Many of them had not been indexed – and none of them to international standards – before the project began. In addition, readers who want to search in the library are still compelled to come in Paris und use the on-site computer, as the library has no online catalogue. The digitisation project will eventually provide online search possibilities. Because of the large number of documents contained in the library, we first decided to focus on three collections : press clippings, periodicals and the collections dedicated to soldiers blinded in the First World War (because the anniversary of the conflict was then being commemorated).

Innumerable press clippings relating to blind people and blindness were collected between 1856 and 1928 and are preserved in large volumes. The articles come from various newspapers (French and foreign) and are grouped under various headings (serials, information on blind people's associations, events, meetings, charity work, history…). This is one of the library's most precious collections, fully representative of the comprehensive approach that has governed the constitution of the collections of this library since its emergence: to constitute an international database on blind people and on blindness. Turning this paper database into a digital one was both important and in accordance with the library’s original aims.

Photograph (© Céline Roussel) showing one of the volumes of press cuttings devoted to blindness (1856 and 1928), on which can be seen an article illustrated with portraits of Valentin Haüy and Louis Braille, as well as a reproduction of the tactile alphabet developed by the latter.

Long before the periodicals Le Valentin Haüy and Le Louis Braille (which were created in 1883 by Maurice de la Sizeranne), several journals set out to bring together the available scientific knowledge on blind people and their education in specialised establishments - while also relaying the personal stories and literary productions of some of them. France was a pioneer in this, but other European countries soon followed suit, and examples include the Messager suisse des aveugles and L'Asile des aveugles de Lausanne. The Bibliothèque patrimoniale came to possess a large collection of periodicals, some of which are in foreign languages (such as Der Blindenfreund and Die Blindenwelt, both published in Germany). The symbolic and historical importance of these works are makes them a priority for the digitisation project.

The library also houses entire collections of periodicals designed to inform soldiers blinded in the First World War about the social networks and rehabilitation centres that were set up at that time to facilitate their reintegration into civilian and working life, and these provide us with an invaluable testimony to this pivotal period in the history of blindness. This is why our first pilot-sample centred on one of the journals in the "Blinded in War" collection of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale: Le Journal des soldats blessés aux yeux. This journal also had the advantage of already being available in digital form on the Paris-Nanterre library website L’Argonnaute: This not only saved us time, but it also showed us how much more ambitious our project was than simply putting a document online – because it involves an XML-TEI structuring and an academic presentation of everything will be published online.

Achievement of a First Pilot-sample: A Future for The Forgotten Library?

Photograph (© Céline Roussel) of the cover of the final issue, dated June 1919, of Le Journal des Soldats Blessés aux Yeux. It states that it was founded by Eugène Brieux, of the Académie Française, that it is monthly, free, and is the 'Organe de l'Œuvre pour les Soldats Blessés au Yeux'.

With the support of the Association Valentin Haüy, and especially of their project manager Hugues de Roquefeuille,, and the expertise of the ObTIC (Observatoire des textes, des idées et des corpus) of Sorbonne Université, in close collaboration with Motasem Alrahabi and Glenn Roe, the academic year 2019-2020 was devoted to the realization of this pilot project. Le Journal des soldats blessés aux yeux, a free monthly magazine founded by Eugène Brieux (1858-1932), a writer, journalist, and member of the Académie française, appeared from November 1916 to June 1919 and was aimed at the soldiers blinded in the First World War. It also gave them a voice in allowing the publication of many of their letters. With this journal, we had the opportunity to test and, when necessary, improve the processing chain on which the whole digitisation project depended. This journal was first indexed according to the Dublin Core and Library of Congress standards, while the researchers of the ObTIC drew up a set of specifications, as well as a first style sheet, necessary for the XML-TEI structuring of the document.

But we encountered some difficulties in establishing a satisfying overview of the logical structure of this document, since the headlines and the chapter-divisions varied from one year (or even from one month!) to another. Many elements (such as quotations, advertising, pictures, and mathematical equations) were widespread in this shape-shifting item and complicated our approach. After many attempts to integrate all these specificities into a stylesheet, we realised that a compromise had to be found, in order to produce a stylesheet general enough to be applicable to other documents. Two employees of L'Atelier de la Villette (which is linked to the association Valentin Haüy and employs people with disabilities), directed by Renaud Lemaire, Isabelle Risco and Rosine Loïal, were then responsible for proofreading and formatting the document according to the style sheet, which lead to satisfying results. We were very keen to work with L’Atelier de la Villette, as this would give disabled people the opportunity to take part into a project dealing with visual disability, The digitisation project would thus become not only accessible, but also inclusive. Finally, three researchers, Gildas Brégain (CNRS-Arènes/Université de Rennes 1), Corinne Doria (The Chinese University of Hong Kong – Shenzhen) and Rebecca Scales (Rochester Institute of Technology), one of whom was personally concerned with disability, wrote scholarly notes on the journal, on Eugène Brieux and on assistive technologies. The purpose of these texts is to provide all necessary information on background and context of this review, making any research on it easier.

This achievement, completed by the success of the ObTIC in generating and designing a website, was all the more encouraging as the association decided to recruit three people, Véronique Harouel, Angelica Herrera and Marie-France Hourcadie, and one person working full time in the library (as part of a sponsorship of competence offered by BNP Paribas), Marie-Bernadette Aubry, whose task is now to index the whole content of the library. We had not expected to reach this stage so early, but it is necessary to conceive the project not only at a small, but at a large scale. The global indexing also draws our attention to documents which, for copyright issues, should be excluded from the final project – even if their reference will be integrated in the online catalogue. With the jurist of the Association, we will debate whether to digitise or not sensitive documents such as personal files, which are undoubtedly interesting for the project, inasmuch as they could allow genealogical research. The website, it is still in construction; how to shape an accessible version of it is constantly debated with the Association and with blind and visually impaired people. Most recently, our project has been associated with another ongoing project, that of Maria Romeiras Amado and her team (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa). This project consists of the transcription, translation (into Portuguese if necessary) and critical edition of 165 letters (in French, English, Spanish and Portuguese) written in the 18th and 19th centuries between several institutions dedicated to blindness in different countries of the world. The objective of this project is to highlight, from these letters between pedagogues, doctors and administrators, the phenomenon of globalisation of the discourse on pedagogy and material adapted to blind pupils as well as their practical effects on the latter, not only through the digital and critical edition of these letters, but also through the constitution of a digital cartography of these circulations As these letters are located in the Valentin Hauy heritage library and are owned by the AVH, Maria Romeiras and her team have very generously agreed to integrate their work into our project, in exchange for permission to publish these letters on the NOVA University website.

Our academic experience in the field of both Disability Studies and Digital Humanities has shown that there is a huge interest for these archive materials. The link between both research fields has already been mentioned in several articles, for instance by Mulka Kurkarni, George H. Williams and Vandana Chaudhry. We are aware that our project has limits – it could be argued that a digital access to archives is no substitute for an exciting discovery of the object itself. The general stylesheets may miss some important and valuable information on the design of a document – selection, per se, is never a fully satisfying solution. We are nevertheless confident that our project will contribute to the fight against what Goggin and Newell (Digital Disability, The Social Construction of Disability in New Media, 2003) called “digital disability”. We truly believe that “by working to meet the needs of disabled people — and by working with disabled people through usability testing but also, and more importantly in our view, through their active participation in editorial choices — the digital humanities community will also benefit significantly as it rethinks its assumptions about how digital devices could and should work with and for people” (George H. Williams, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012).

Targeting an audience will be our next challenge: There could be various ways of doing - advertising in our academic networks as well as in the associative structures for blind people the association Valentin Haüy is in contact with. Or, as it is often the case for digitisation projects, by elaborating a newsletter giving words to the team responsible for the project, but also to readers, blind or sighted, to reflect upon the documents they would have access to. A tight collaboration between our academic institutions and the association Valentin Haüy has already opened up hopeful paths in preserving and giving a new life to the cultural and intellectual project of its founder, Maurice de la Sizeranne. Marion and I truly hope it will at length make accessible to anyone the unexpected cultural richness of blindness.

Websites dedicated to digitised blind archives:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32809419q/date

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32886746c/date

https://www.perkins.org/archives/

https://louis.aph.org/aph-library/#/

https://www.afb.org/HelenKellerArchive

https://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/resultRecherche/resultRecherche.php?COMPOSITION_ID=21842

We would like to thank the librarians and curators Jennifer Arnott, Susanna Coit and Jennifer Hale from Perkins, Justin A. Gardner from the American Printing House for the Blind and Helen Selsdon from the American Foundation for the Blind, for having inspired us and even supported us in our project.

Overview of the collections from the library Bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy:

• Periodicals (Le Journal des Soldats blessés aux yeux ; Le Mutilé des yeux…)
• Catalogues (Katalog des Museums des Blindenwesens in Wien…)
• Registers (Les Établissements généraux de bienfaisance placés sous le patronage de l’Impératrice…)
• Institutional correspondence (AVH, INJA, institutes abroad in Europe and accross the Atlantic…)
• Historical books (Léon Legrand, Les Quinze-Vingts depuis leur fondation, 1887…)
• Essays (Jacques Lusseyran, Ce que l’on voit sans les yeux, 1958 ; Valentin Haüy, Essai sur l'éducation des aveugles, 1786…)
• Biographies (Pierre Villey, Maurice de la Sizeranne, aveugle, bienfaiteur des aveugles, 1932…)
• Press clippings (Georgette Leblanc, « Hellen Keller, le miracle vivant », Candide, n° 688, 20 mai 1937…)
• Novels (Jacques Lusseyran, Le Silence des hommes, 1954...) Poetry (Jean-François Revoil, Souvenirs, Poésies, 1909…)
• Autobiographies (Jacques Arago, Souvenirs d’un aveugle. Voyage autour du monde, 1844 ; Martin Franquel, Comment je devins aveugle. Épisode de ma vie, 1910…)
• Published diaries (Marie Lenéru, Journal de Marie Lenéru, Précédé du Journal d’enfance, 1945…)
• Collected works (François Coppée, Œuvres complètes, 1886-1888, en 6 tomes…) Plays (Marie Lenéru, La Maison sur le roc, 1927…)
• Manuscripts (Edgar Guilbeau, Ma vie d’élève. Souvenirs sincères d’un octogénaire, 1890…)

References:

Goggin, Gerard, Newell, Christopher, Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 

Williams, George H., "Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities", in Gold, Matthiew K., (ed.), Debates in the Digital Humanities, Minneapolis/London, University of Minnesota Press, 2012. (https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/2a59a6fe-3e93-43ae-a42f-1b26d1b4becc)

Photograph (© Jacques Fournier) showing one of the corners of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale, whose two walls on either side house tall wooden cupboards, solid at the bottom and glazed at the top. Some of the library's books can be seen in these glass cabinets, as well as numerous blue files containing brochures, articles and manuscripts on blindness.

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Céline Roussel is scholar at Ludwig-Maximilians University München, Germany. Marion Chottin is scholar at CNRS/Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France.

Recommended citation

Céline Roussel/ Marion Chottin (2023): The Forgotten Room of the association Valentin Haüy in Paris, or How to Build an Inclusive Digitisation Project on the History of Blindness. In: Public Disabilitiy History 8 (2023) 5.

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