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

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.