Laura Seymour is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University. She is PI of the collaborative project AMEND – Early Modern European Neurodivergence (2025-2030), funded by the Wellcome Trust. Laura is the author of Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (2022), Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (2025) and Early Modern Neurodivergence (2026) and various articles and book chapters on neurodivergence and early modern literature.

Seymour’s brilliant book exfoliates texts to show how the kinaesthetic experience of the characters can be written to evoke the reader’s kinaesthetic experience. Reading her reading makes us aware of the ways our body is involved in making meaning while we read. Her book is a model of how to incorporate research on embodied cognition into literary studies.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: The Body At Play in Early Modern Texts Chapter 1: Ungracious Grace: Proprioception and Staging Taste in Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play The Devil is In It The Devil Saying Grace: Folklore and Oxymoron A Gust of Wind that Fans the Fire: Monks Hotting Up Mistrusting the Self Conclusion Chapter 2: Walking without God — (mis)learning through the gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622) Guzmán’s Pedagogical Texts: God and the Beggar’s Book Conclusion: Against Learning – Guzmán and the Widow Chapter 3: Plain Plasticity— Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714) Masculinity and Self-Shaping: A Simple Perspective? Conclusion Chapter 4: Chaste and Silent – Again. Vitality and the bound and loosed body in I.T.’s Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and His Dame (c.1600) Tyed Tongues Vitality: Outside of Language Conclusion

Laura Seymour is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University. She is PI of the collaborative project AMEND – Early Modern European Neurodivergence (2025-2030), funded by the Wellcome Trust. Laura is the author of Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (2022), Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (2025) and Early Modern Neurodivergence (2026) and various articles and book chapters on neurodivergence and early modern literature.

Seymour’s brilliant book exfoliates texts to show how the kinaesthetic experience of the characters can be written to evoke the reader’s kinaesthetic experience. Reading her reading makes us aware of the ways our body is involved in making meaning while we read. Her book is a model of how to incorporate research on embodied cognition into literary studies.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: The Body At Play in Early Modern Texts Chapter 1: Ungracious Grace: Proprioception and Staging Taste in Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play The Devil is In It The Devil Saying Grace: Folklore and Oxymoron A Gust of Wind that Fans the Fire: Monks Hotting Up Mistrusting the Self Conclusion Chapter 2: Walking without God — (mis)learning through the gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622) Guzmán’s Pedagogical Texts: God and the Beggar’s Book Conclusion: Against Learning – Guzmán and the Widow Chapter 3: Plain Plasticity— Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714) Masculinity and Self-Shaping: A Simple Perspective? Conclusion Chapter 4: Chaste and Silent – Again. Vitality and the bound and loosed body in I.T.’s Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and His Dame (c.1600) Tyed Tongues Vitality: Outside of Language Conclusion

Laura Seymour is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University. She is PI of the collaborative project AMEND – Early Modern European Neurodivergence (2025-2030), funded by the Wellcome Trust. Laura is the author of Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (2022), Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (2025) and Early Modern Neurodivergence (2026) and various articles and book chapters on neurodivergence and early modern literature.

Seymour’s brilliant book exfoliates texts to show how the kinaesthetic experience of the characters can be written to evoke the reader’s kinaesthetic experience. Reading her reading makes us aware of the ways our body is involved in making meaning while we read. Her book is a model of how to incorporate research on embodied cognition into literary studies.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: The Body At Play in Early Modern Texts Chapter 1: Ungracious Grace: Proprioception and Staging Taste in Thomas Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play The Devil is In It The Devil Saying Grace: Folklore and Oxymoron A Gust of Wind that Fans the Fire: Monks Hotting Up Mistrusting the Self Conclusion Chapter 2: Walking without God — (mis)learning through the gait in Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) and James Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622) Guzmán’s Pedagogical Texts: God and the Beggar’s Book Conclusion: Against Learning – Guzmán and the Widow Chapter 3: Plain Plasticity— Thomas Ellwood’s The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714) Masculinity and Self-Shaping: A Simple Perspective? Conclusion Chapter 4: Chaste and Silent – Again. Vitality and the bound and loosed body in I.T.’s Grim the Collier of Croydon; or, The Devil and His Dame (c.1600) Tyed Tongues Vitality: Outside of Language Conclusion