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Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Culture / ed. by Alice Equestri.
- Format:
- Book
- Series:
- Edinburgh Critical Studies in Early Modern Literature and Disability
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (312 p.) : 11 black & white illustrations
- Edition:
- 1st ed.
- Place of Publication:
- Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2025]
- Language Note:
- In English.
- Summary:
- Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Culture is the first edited collection focusing completely on intellectual disability in the early modern period. It offers in-depth analyses of texts from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Rabelais, and others, alongside medical and legal treatises, court cases, and political pamphlets. Through social, political or religious bias, intellectual disability could be mapped onto a wider/different range of individuals than it is today. The range of essays included in this book gives a representation of the multifacetedness of the concept by analysing the recurrence of intellectual disability (in the form of characters or tropes) in literary and non-literary genres across various countries. Bringing new case studies to the fore, or reevaluating classic ones (such as Shakespeare’s wise fools) through the tools of critical disability studies, this collection showcases intellectual disability histories as products of the interaction between the individual and different contexts or communities sharing political, religious, or colonial interests and ideologies. The book therefore probes the social, cultural and environmental aspects of disability and disablement, also inviting connections between disability and other minority statuses, particularly race.
- Contents:
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on contributors
- Part One Court and power
- Chapter 1 Humour and disability: French sixteenth-century literary portrayals of the jester Triboulet
- Chapter 2 ‘Let antimasques not be long; they have been commonly of fools’: intellectual disability and neurodiversity in Ben Jonson’s masques
- Chapter 3 Invested in motley: intellectual disability and the fool’s licence in Shakespeare
- Part Two Community, politics and society
- Chapter 4 What was so funny about Jack Adams? The intellectually disabled individual as a public figure of mirth in early modern London
- Chapter 5 ‘VVhether the mind wants eyes, or eyes want minde’. Parasitic twins and intellectual disability in early modern Europe: the case of Lazzaro and Giovanni Battista Colloredo
- Chapter 6 Conceiving brainlessness: the anencephalous child, the human person and the headless mob
- Chapter 7 ‘The world’s fond idiot’: Robert Armin, Blue John and the performance of idiocy
- Part Three Soul and afterworld
- Chapter 8 Gil Vicente: Auto da Barca do Inferno and the representation of the ‘fool’ in early modern Portuguese drama
- Chapter 9 Developmental disability as material, metaphor and essential difference in an Elizabethan morality play
- Chapter 10 ‘This silly deluded woman’: rhapsodic experiences and intellectual disability in Humphrey Ellis’s Pseudochristus (1650)
- Part Four Global encounters
- Chapter 11 Race and negotiations of intellectual inferiority in early modern travel writing and ethnography, 1550–1660
- Chapter 12 Whiteness as knowingness: race and intellectual disability in Shakespeare’s Othello
- Afterword The intellect, its disabilities and their historical production
- Index
- Notes:
- Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Apr 2025)
- ISBN:
- 9781399546362
- 1399546368
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