Abstract

This essay looks at the notion of the non-speaking and therefore the presumed non-rational person, whose fully human status was debatable and debated during the Middle Ages, following a development that especially arose from the new intellectual culture of the universities and the impact of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century. Persons who were congenitally intellectually disabled, as the modern definition has it, could in medieval thinking sometimes reside at the interstices of human, and therefore supposedly fully rational, and non-human being, an in-between, liminal position often defined according to the individual’s capacity for language and speech, hence the importance of the notion of being both deprived of language and rationality. Children, animals, intellectually disabled but also congenitally deaf people could all be considered irrational due to their lack of speech. These disparate categories, according to modern classifications, demonstrate that medieval systems of knowledge used schema to make sense of the world that differed significantly from modern medico-scientific concepts. Specifically, the essay tries to examine possible reasons for why, on the one hand, humans deemed irrational, illogical are not put on trial, yet, on the other hand, animals deemed illogical sometimes are prosecuted.