Preaching and the body: Lame Mephibosheth in early seventeenth-century England and Scotland

Abstract

“Lame Mephibosheth” is a minor character in 2 Samuel, but one who features in multiple contexts in sermons and other religious writing of the Jacobean and Caroline periods. This article uses close reading to build on previous scholarship on the use of the Saul-David narrative in the political sphere, demonstrating the use of Mephibosheth’s disabled body in this area as well as in wider theological contexts. Mephibosheth’s lameness is assigned significance regarding sin, whether original or otherwise, and is associated with birth, accident, and disease, depending on the preacher’s intended message. Mephibosheth represents an unusually authentic and consistent disabled biblical figure and is used to express disability as a category, as a synecdoche and through inclusion in lists. The overlooked figure of Mephibosheth illuminates early seventeenth-century attitudes to the body, whereby the physically disabled body is manipulated and posed in the service of the spoken and written word.