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Magdalena, “Deaf and Mute,” Makes Her Roman Will (1590)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2025

Thomas V. Cohen Open the ORCID record for Thomas V. Cohen [Opens in a new window]
Thomas V. Cohen*
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York University, England
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Abstract

By early modern Roman law, persons born deaf, if they could neither speak nor write, could not make their last will and testament. In the event recounted here, thanks to a coordinated effort by her family, her advocates, papal officialdom, her beneficiaries, and Magdalena herself, the formally impossible proved possible. This article, offering a close reading of the unusual document that lays out the complex tests applied to Magdalena to let her act as a legal persona, asks what her story reveals about the attitudes of the papal state, and of Romans, both to this disability and to the personhood of those who struggled successfully to overcome legal discrimination surrounding it.

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Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , Winter 2024 , pp. 1184 - 1221
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by the Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

This article has taken wise counsel from scholars of the psychology of deafness and language acquisition: Jacob Beck and Fernanda Horta; of deaf history, disability history, and medical history: Brad Bouley, Brenda-Jo Brueggemann, Sharon Farmer, and Rosamund Oates; of art history: Brenda Drucker, Pamela Jones, Angelo Lo Conte, Maria Loh, Marije Osnabrugge, and Barbara Wisch; of the history of law and history overall: Irene Fosi, Thomas Kuehn, Alessia Meneghin, and Susanne Pohl; and from expert referees.

References

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