Blind as the Sparrow Hawk: The Emergence of Dantean Disability Studies

This essay offers the first sustained study of disability in Dante’s works and introduces the application of disability studies to medieval Italian literature. Focusing on Purgatorio 13, where the envious souls are temporarily blinded, I argue that Dante distinguishes between divine punishment and material disability, and that his representation of blindness draws on real-world experiences of disability in late medieval Florence. Dante compares the punishment of the souls to the practice of “seeling” the eyes of sparrow hawks. He compares the emotional effect of encountering these souls to encountering blind beggars leaning on one another outside churches, grounding the scene in a familiar urban image and signaling his attention to the embodied and cultural understanding of blindness. Dante presents the blind not as objects of stigma, but as active agents who navigate systems of charity and work to evoke compassion from the sighted. Drawing on medieval disability studies and the work of contemporary theorists such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Eva Kittay, I propose that Dante’s portrayal resists stigma, highlights disability as a resource, and theorizes a medieval care ethics, opening new directions for both Dante studies and disability studies.