Edinburgh Critical Studies in Early Modern Literature and Disability – serie

The governing questions of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment and Care are threefold: What does reading Milton's texts and literature generally through the theoretical lens of disability, embodiment and care studies (DEC) reveal that was illegible before? How have Milton's visual and mobility impairments, as well as his artistic representations of human biodiversity, factored into his status as a canonical author? And what insights does bringing a DEC lens to Milton's body of work and its reception give us into literature and longstanding stereotypes about humans and their cultural and physical environments? The thirteen chapters, Foreword and Afterword of this collection, composed by established and emerging scholars, provide cogent answers by drawing on the contributors' expertise in various fields. The volume advances what Milton's texts from sonnet to epic and political tract to tragedy can tell us about not only literary representations of human variation, physical and mental, but also cultural responses to disability, embodiment and care that affect all readers and all people today.

Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Culture is the first edited collection focusing completely on intellectual disability in the early modern period. It offers in-depth analyses of texts from Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Rabelais, and others, alongside medical and legal treatises, court cases, and political pamphlets. Through social, political or religious bias, intellectual disability could be mapped onto a wider/different range of individuals than it is today. The range of essays included in this book gives a representation of the multifacetedness of the concept by analysing the recurrence of intellectual disability (in the form of characters or tropes) in literary and non-literary genres across various countries. Bringing new case studies to the fore, or reevaluating classic ones (such as Shakespeare's wise fools) through the tools of critical disability studies, this collection showcases intellectual disability histories as products of the interaction between the individual and different contexts or communities sharing political, religious, or colonial interests and ideologies. The book therefore probes the social, cultural and environmental aspects of disability and disablement, also inviting connections between disability and other minority statuses, particularly race.