Recovering Disability in Early Modern England

Scholars have spent two decades reading Renaissance England through class, race, gender and sexuality, yet disability, which appears everywhere in the period's literature, has gone largely unexamined or been misread. This collection of ten essays sets out to correct that, proposing early modern disability studies as a fresh way into questions of human variation and selfhood in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and into more politically engaged teaching.

The range is wide: real court dwarfs alongside the dwarf narrators of Spenser's poetry, madness in revenge tragedy, feigned disability in Jonson, the humour of Renaissance jest books, Aphra Behn on gender, the Book of Common Prayer as an accommodation for cognitive disability, and the ableism built into Hobbes's and Locke's ideas of freedom. One essay follows Richard III into the politics of the postcommunist Czech Republic. A rewarding, provocative resource for students and teachers of early modern literature.