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Publication Date

2025

Keywords

intellectual disability, England, literary monuments

Abstract

In Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern England, Alice Equestri has assembled an impressive collection of essays by researchers interested in early modern conceptions of intellectual disability. Like Hobgood and Wood's groundbreaking collection Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (2013) and Leslie C. Dunn's edited collection Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (2020), Equestri's volume will benefit scholars for some time to come. Of use to both early career scholars and those well established in the field of early modern disability studies, Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern England invites readers into twelve individual studies of a diverse set of early modern texts that, as Equestri's title of her introduction states, reconstruct the "meanings, relations, and ecologies of intellectual disability" across early modern Europe. These European contexts include, for example, French jester portraits, English masques, a case of parasitic Italian twins, Portuguese drama, Elizabethan morality plays, travel writing, and Shakespearean tragedy, as well as a discussion of a taxonomy of idiocy and foolishness in the writings of Robert Armin. The volume concludes with a provocative essay by Christopher Goodey that, in relatively brief space, differentiates relativistic conceptions of intellectual disability from those that are historically grounded, reminding readers that historicity takes various explanatory forms - materialist, sociological, conceptual - and that it is through these strategies that we attempt to comprehend the early modern past as we struggle to "provide a precise historical basis for investigation" of intellectual disability.

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