Introduction : ethical staring : disabling the English Renaissance / Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood -- Dwarf aesthetics in Spenser's Faerie queene and the early modern court / Sara van den Berg -- Maternal culpability in fetal defects : Aphra Behn's satiric interrogations of medical models / Emily Bowles -- Disability humor and the meanings of impairment in early modern England / David M. Turner -- Antic dispositions : mental and intellectual disabilities in early modern revenge tragedy / Lindsey Row-Heyveld -- Disabling allegories in Edmund Spenser's Faerie queene / Rachel E. Hile -- Performing blindness : representing disability in early modern popular performance and print / Simone Chess -- "There is no suff'ring due" : metatheatricality and disability drag in Volpone / Lauren Coker -- Richard recast : Renaissance disability in a postcommunist culture / Marcela Kostihová -- The Book of common prayer, theory of mind, and autism in early modern England / Mardy Philippian, Jr -- Freedom and (dis)ability in early modern political thought / Nancy Hirschmann -- Coda : Shakespearean disability pedagogy / Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood.

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While early modern selfhood has been explored via a series of historical identity studies involving class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality, until recently there has been little engagement with disability and disabled selves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This omission is especially problematic, insofar as representations of disabled bodies and minds serve as some of the signature features in English Renaissance texts. This book explores how recent conversations about difference in the period have either overlooked or misidentified disability representations. It also presents early modern disability studies as a new theoretical lens that can reanimate scholarly dialogue about human variation and early modern subjectivities even as it motivates more politically invested classroom pedagogies. The ten essays in this collection range across genre, scope, and time, including examinations of real-life court dwarfs and dwarf narrators in Edmund Spenser’s poetry; disability in Aphra Behn’s assessment of gender and femininity; disability humor, Renaissance jest books, and cultural ideas about difference; madness in revenge tragedies; Spenserian allegory and impairment; the materiality of literary blindness; feigned disability in Jonsonian drama; political appropriation of Richard III in the postcommunist Czech Republic; the Book of Common Prayer as textual accommodation for cognitive disability; and Thomas Hobbes’s and John Locke’s inherently ableist conceptions of freedom and political citizenship.

English.

Description based on print version record.