Recovering Disability in Early Modern England

Scholars have spent two decades reading Renaissance England through class, race, gender and sexuality, yet disability has been largely overlooked or misread, even though disabled bodies and minds appear throughout the period's literature. This collection of ten essays presents early modern disability studies as a fresh framework for questions of human variation and selfhood in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

The essays cover a wide range: real court dwarfs and the dwarf narrators of Spenser's poetry, madness in revenge tragedy, feigned disability in Jonson's drama, Renaissance jest books, Aphra Behn on gender and femininity, the Book of Common Prayer as an accommodation for cognitive disability, and the ableism in Hobbes's and Locke's ideas of freedom. One essay follows Richard III into the politics of the postcommunist Czech Republic. The publisher offers it as a resource for students and teachers of early modern literature, and as a way to bring more politically engaged teaching into the classroom.