Overview

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.

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9781399546348

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This is an excellent book, written responsibly and with care, that makes a compelling case for bringing experiences of disability from the past into conversation with experiences in the present. I learned much from reading it.--Elizabeth Bearden, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Author Information

Alice Equestri is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Padua, Italy and former Marie Sklodowska-Curie researcher at the University of Sussex. She has published two monographs: Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law, and Medicine 1500-1640 (2021; winner of the AIA Junior Book Prize 2023) and The Fools of Shakespeare's Romances (2016). Her essays have appeared in venues including Studies in Philology, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Renaissance Studies, Notes and Queries, Disability Studies Quarterly and Cahiers Élisabéthains. Her research interests include folly and intellectual disability in Early Modern English Literature, Shakespeare, Robert Armin, English translations or adaptations of Italian novellas, and law and literature.

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