Q&A

Left-handedness
Is there evidence of prejudice against left-handers in the medieval period, and if not, when did prejudice begin to be reported?
Illustration by Glen McBeth
There are a multitude of first-person accounts of left-handedness being treated as a disability, often involving school pupils having one hand tied behind their back until they’d learned to use their right hand. In fact left-handedness has long been associated with negative aspects of the personality in many different cultures, a bias that survives in our languages today. The French word...
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