The objective of this presentation is to demonstrate that our present concept of disability --understood as the adverse social response to mental and physical impairments and the consequential implementation of institutional segregation-- was already taking shape in the proposals for the reform and control of the poor in influential sixteenth-century works. A review of the most significant discourses on poverty in the Iberian Peninsula show the formation of a primitive category of disability in the recommended social practices and ordinances. These books include Juan Luis Vives, De subventione pauperum (1526) (On Assistance to the Poor); Domingo de Soto, Deliberación en la causa de lo pobres (1545) (Deliberation for the Cause of the Poor); Juan de Robles, De la orden que en algunos pueblos de España se ha puesto en la limosna: para remedio de los verdaderos pobres (1545) (Of the Ordinance on Charity Implemented in Some Spanish Towns for the Remediation of the Poor); Miguel de Giginta, Tratado de remedio de pobres (1579) (Treatise of the remediation of poor), and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, Amparo de pobres (1598) (Protection of Poor).
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
University of Notre Dame
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, a Faculty Fellow of the Medieval Institute and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and a faculty member of the Disability Studies Forum at the University of Notre Dame. Her specialization is Early Modern Spanish literature and culture. Her research interests include Quevedo and Cervantes’s works, autobiographical and picaresque prose, women's writings (Teresa de Cartagena, Teresa de Ávila, Catalina de Erauso), cultural clothing, and disability studies.
Professor Juárez-Almendros has published Italia en la vida y obra de Quevedo (1990), El cuerpo vestido y la construcción de la identidad en las narrativas autobiográficas del Siglo de Oro (Tamesis, 2006) and Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints (Liverpool UP, 2017). She has edited the special section Disability Studies in the Hispanic World (Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2013). Her articles have appeared in Cervantes, MLA, Bulletin of the Comediantes, La Perinola, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Revista Canadiense and eHumanista. She has been a member of the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession (2005-2008) and of the MLA Executive Committee Division on Disability Studies (2009-2014).
