Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England

Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 228
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781000424997
ISBN-13 : 1000424995
Rating : 4/5 (97 Downloads)

Synopsis Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England by : Alice Equestri

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended ‘irrationality’ entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others’ perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools? Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools’ characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.

Recovering Disability in Early Modern England

Recovering Disability in Early Modern England
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 224
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0814212158
ISBN-13 : 9780814212158
Rating : 4/5 (58 Downloads)

Synopsis Recovering Disability in Early Modern England by : Allison P. Hobgood

While early modern selfhood has been explored during the last two decades via a series of historical identity studies involving class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality, until very 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. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England 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 Prayeras textual accommodation for cognitive disability; and Thomas Hobbes's and John Locke's inherently ableist conceptions of freedom and political citizenship.

Moralizing the Italian Marvellous in Early Modern England

Moralizing the Italian Marvellous in Early Modern England
Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Total Pages : 248
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781040225790
ISBN-13 : 1040225799
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Synopsis Moralizing the Italian Marvellous in Early Modern England by : Beatrice Fuga

This volume breaks new ground in the exploration of Anglo-Italian cultural relations: it presents analyses of a wide range of early modern Italian texts adapted into contemporary English culture, often through intermediary French translations. When transposed into English, their Italian origin was frequently categorized as marvellous and consequently censured because of its strangeness: thus, English translators often gave their public a moralized and tamed version of Italy’s uniqueness. This volume’s contributors show that an effective way of moralizing Italian custom was to exoticize its origins, in order to protect the English public from an Italianate influence. This ubiquitous moralization is visible in the evolution of the concept of tragedy, and in the overtly educational aim acquired by the Italian novella, adapted for an allegedly female audience. Through the analysis of various literary genres (novella, epic poem, play, essay), the volume focuses on the mechanisms of appropriation and rejection of Italian culture through imported topoi and narremes.

Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama
Author :
Publisher : Springer
Total Pages : 252
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9783319921358
ISBN-13 : 3319921355
Rating : 4/5 (58 Downloads)

Synopsis Dissembling Disability in Early Modern English Drama by : Lindsey Row-Heyveld

Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? This book uncovers a previously unexamined theatrical tradition and explores the way counterfeit disability captivated the Renaissance stage. Through detailed case studies of both lesser-known and canonical plays (by Shakespeare, Jonson, Marston, and others), Lindsey Row-Heyveld demonstrates why counterfeit disability proved so useful to early modern playwrights. Changing approaches to almsgiving in the English Reformation led to increasing concerns about feigned disability. The theater capitalized on those concerns, using the counterfeit-disability tradition to explore issues of charity, epistemology, and spectatorship. By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion. The result is the still-pervasive insistence that even genuinely disabled people must perform in order to, paradoxically, prove the authenticity of their impairments.

Private Honour and Noble Masculine Image in Early Modern England

Private Honour and Noble Masculine Image in Early Modern England
Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Total Pages : 171
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781000774283
ISBN-13 : 1000774287
Rating : 4/5 (83 Downloads)

Synopsis Private Honour and Noble Masculine Image in Early Modern England by : Erika D'Souza

Robert Sidney, the first Earl of Leicester (1563–1626), serves as an exemplar of an Elizabethan nobleman who had in his collection a body of work pertinent to the subject of masculine honour in the private realm. Understanding the nuances and evolution of the term private honour as it is represented in Sidney’s artefacts, as well as in the public discourse of the era, is the work and contribution of this book. The permeability between the private and public spheres led to an emergence of new forms of masculine representation. In a time when manhood was intertwined with militaristic qualities (such as courage, strength and fortitude), my investigation shows that in the domestic sphere, a gentler version of masculinity, encouraging humility, constancy and modesty, was fostered amongst the nobility. While worries of effeminacy certainly existed, there also was a strong discourse that encourage men to adopt so-called feminine virtues within the private sphere.

Intellectual disability

Intellectual disability
Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Total Pages : 354
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781526125330
ISBN-13 : 1526125331
Rating : 4/5 (30 Downloads)

Synopsis Intellectual disability by : Patrick McDonagh

This collection explores the historical origins of our modern concepts of intellectual or learning disability. The essays, from some of the leading historians of ideas of intellectual disability, focus on British and European material from the Middle Ages to the late-nineteenth century and extend across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical and psychiatric histories. They investigate how precursor concepts and discourses were shaped by and interacted with their particular social, cultural and intellectual environments, eventually giving rise to contemporary ideas. The collection is essential reading for scholars interested in the history of intelligence, intellectual disability and related concepts, as well as in disability history generally.

Memory's Library

Memory's Library
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 354
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226781723
ISBN-13 : 0226781720
Rating : 4/5 (23 Downloads)

Synopsis Memory's Library by : Jennifer Summit

In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.

Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind

Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 225
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351855457
ISBN-13 : 135185545X
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Synopsis Cervantes and the Early Modern Mind by : Isabel Jaén

This book explores the work of Cervantes in relation to the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Europe and were propelled by thinkers such as Juan Luis Vives, Juan Huarte de San Juan, Oliva Sabuco, Andrés Laguna, Andrés Velásquez, Marsilio Ficino, and Gómez Pereira. The editors bring together humanists and scientists: literary scholars and doctors whose interdisciplinary research integrates diverse types of sources (philosophical and medical treatises, natural histories, rhetoric manuals, pharmacopoeias, etc.) alongside Cervantes’s works to examine themes and areas including emotion, human development, animal vs. human consciousness, pathologies of the mind, and mind-altering substances. Their chapters trace the cognitive themes and points of inquiry that Cervantes shares with other early modern thinkers, showing how he both echoes and contributes to early modern views of the mind.

Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent

Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 308
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781000539707
ISBN-13 : 1000539709
Rating : 4/5 (07 Downloads)

Synopsis Early Modern Women Writers Engendering Descent by : Marie H. Loughlin

Focusing on Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Sidney Wroth’s use of the figures of origin, descent, and inheritance in their poetry and prose, this book examines how these central women writers situated themselves in terms of early modern England’s rich ancestral cultures, employing these and other genealogical concepts to talk about authorship, family, selfhood, and memory. In turn, both Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth also shaped their works in relation to the ways in which writers within their familial communities and literary coteries constructed them as Sidneys, heirs, descendants, and future ancestors, in genres ranging from the patronage dedication and pastoral eclogue to mythographic genealogia and georgic poetry. In the intersection of ancestry, death, sexuality, and reproduction, the book contends that Sidney Herbert and Sidney Wroth develop their authorship within the simultaneous rigidity and flexibility of their world’s genealogical discourses.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 283
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781107087828
ISBN-13 : 1107087821
Rating : 4/5 (28 Downloads)

Synopsis The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability by : Clare Barker

Working across time periods and critical contexts, this volume provides the most comprehensive overview of literary representations of disability.