Performing Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

Performing Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Britain PDF Author: Mark C Chambers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781802700091
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines the nature and socialization of disabled performers in the medieval and early Tudor periods.

Performing Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

Performing Disability in Medieval and Early Modern Britain PDF Author: Mark C Chambers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781802700091
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Examines the nature and socialization of disabled performers in the medieval and early Tudor periods.

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama PDF Author: Leslie C. Dunn
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030572080
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.

Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World PDF Author: Richard H. Godden
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030254585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.

Medieval Disability Sourcebook

Medieval Disability Sourcebook PDF Author: Cameron Hunt McNabb
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
The field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present. This interdisciplinary volume on medieval Europe combines historical records, medical texts, and religious accounts of saints' lives and miracles, as well as poetry, prose, drama, and manuscript images to demonstrate the varied and complicated attitudes medieval societies had about disability. Far from recording any monolithic understanding of disability in the Middle Ages, these contributions present a striking range of voices-to, from, and about those with disabilities-and such diversity only confirms how disability permeated (and permeates) every aspect of life. The Medieval Disability Sourcebook is designed for use inside the undergraduate or graduate classroom or by scholars interested in learning more about medieval Europe as it intersects with the field of disability studies. Most texts are presented in modern English, though some are preserved in Middle English and many are given in side-by-side translations for greater study. Each entry is prefaced with an academic introduction to disability within the text as well as a bibliography for further study. This sourcebook is the first in a proposed series focusing on disability in a wide range of premodern cultures, histories, and geographies.

Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England

Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England PDF Author: Alice Equestri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000424995
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
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.

Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind

Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind PDF Author: Edward Wheatley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472117203
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
"Bold, deeply learned, and important, offering a provocative thesis that is worked out through legal and archival materials and in subtle and original readings of literary texts. Absolutely new in content and significantly innovative in methodology and argument, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind offers a cultural geography of medieval blindness that invites us to be more discriminating about how we think of geographies of disability today." ---Christopher Baswell, Columbia University "A challenging, interesting, and timely book that is also very well written . . . Wheatley has researched and brought together a leitmotiv that I never would have guessed was so pervasive, so intriguing, so worthy of a book." ---Jody Enders, University of California, Santa Barbara Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind presents the first comprehensive exploration of a disability in the Middle Ages, drawing on the literature, history, art history, and religious discourse of England and France. It relates current theories of disability to the cultural and institutional constructions of blindness in the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, examining the surprising differences in the treatment of blind people and the responses to blindness in these two countries. The book shows that pernicious attitudes about blindness were partially offset by innovations and ameliorations---social; literary; and, to an extent, medical---that began to foster a fuller understanding and acceptance of blindness. A number of practices and institutions in France, both positive and negative---blinding as punishment, the foundation of hospices for the blind, and some medical treatment---resulted in not only attitudes that commodified human sight but also inhumane satire against the blind in French literature, both secular and religious. Anglo-Saxon and later medieval England differed markedly in all three of these areas, and the less prominent position of blind people in society resulted in noticeably fewer cruel representations in literature. This book will interest students of literature, history, art history, and religion because it will provide clear contexts for considering any medieval artifact relating to blindness---a literary text, a historical document, a theological treatise, or a work of art. For some readers, the book will serve as an introduction to the field of disability studies, an area of increasing interest both within and outside of the academy. Edward Wheatley is Surtz Professor of Medieval Literature at Loyola University, Chicago.

Disability in Medieval Europe

Disability in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Irina Metzler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134217382
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
This impressive volume presents a thorough examination of all aspects of physical impairment and disability in medieval Europe. Examining a popular era that is of great interest to many historians and researchers, Irene Metzler presents a theoretical framework of disability and explores key areas such as: medieval theoretical concepts theology and natural philosophy notions of the physical body medical theory and practice. Bringing into play the modern day implications of medieval thought on the issue, this is a fascinating and informative addition to the research studies of medieval history, history of medicine and disability studies scholars the English-speaking world over.

Recovering Disability in Early Modern England

Recovering Disability in Early Modern England PDF Author: Allison P. Hobgood
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814212158
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
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.

Disability in the Middle Ages

Disability in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Dr Joshua R Eyler
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140947593X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
What do we mean when we talk about disability in the Middle Ages? This volume brings together dynamic scholars working on the subject in medieval literature and history, who use the latest approaches from the field to address this central question. Contributors discuss such standard medieval texts as the Arthurian Legend, The Canterbury Tales and Old Norse Sagas, providing an accessible entry point to the field of medieval disability studies to medievalists. The essays explore a wide variety of disabilities, including the more traditionally accepted classifications of blindness and deafness, as well as perceived disabilities such as madness, pregnancy and age. Adopting a ground-breaking new approach to the study of disability in the medieval period, this provocative book will interest medievalists and scholars of disability throughout history.

Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World

Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World PDF Author: Kristina Richardson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074864508X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Medieval Arab notions of physical difference can feel singularly arresting for modern audiences. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights', as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference? How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, (auto)biographies, erotic poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and theological tracts, the cultural views and experiences of disability and difference in the medieval Islamic world are brought to life.