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The integration of the blind into society has always meant taking on prejudices and inaccurate representations. This anthropological and cultural history introduces us to both real and imaginary figures from the past, uncovering French attitudes towards the blind from the Middle Ages through the first half of the nineteenth century. Much of the book, however, centers on the eighteenth century, the enlightened age of Diderot's emblematic blind man and of the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, founded by Valentin Haüy, the great benefactor of blind people. The book paints a picture of the blind admitted to the institutions created for them and of the conditions under which they lived, from the officially sanctioned beggars of the medieval Quinze–Vingts to the cloth makers of the Institute for Blind Workers. It has also uncovered their fictional counterparts in an array of poems, plays, and novels. The book concludes with Braille, whose invention of writing with raised dots gave blind people around the world definitive access to silent reading and to written communication.

Unruly women are not often represented in a good light. Whether historical or fictional, disruptive women, with their real or imagined excesses, have long provided the material for literary and legal narratives. This work analyzes a series of literary, legal, and historical texts to demonstrate the persistence of certain gender stereotypes. In her 1820 adultery trial, Queen Caroline was depicted in a cartoon riding into the House of Lords on a black ram that had the face of her Italian lover. As this book reveals, a number of women, remembered largely for their insubordinate presence, have metaphorically “ridden the black ram” in the last 700 years. The author's historicized understanding of the relationship between law and literature reveals a disquieting pattern in the legal and literary representations of women, and provides a new recognition of the significance of sexuality and gender in the way we narrate our world.