Past Imperfect
Disabled people were prominent at the court of the Spanish Habsburgs. Janet Ravenscroft examines the roles they played and draws comparisons with modern attitudes towards physical imperfection.
The recent Paralympic Games forced the able-bodied among us to pay serious attention to the disabled minority in our midst, perhaps for the first time. One of the achievements of the games was to bring the athletes’ differences to the fore while, paradoxically, making their disabilities far less remarkable than their extraordinary abilities. Encounters of this kind force us to reconsider how we define and value disability and the ways in which we interact with people who are not ‘like us’.
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