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  3. Beholding Disability in Renaissance England

Beholding Disability in Renaissance England

Allison P. Hobgood
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  • Overview

  • Contents

Human variation has always existed, though it has been conceived of and responded to variably. Beholding Disability in Renaissance England interprets sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature to explore the fraught distinctiveness of human bodyminds and the deliberate ways they were constructed in early modernity as able, and not. Hobgood examines early modern disability, ableism, and disability gain, purposefully employing these contemporary concepts to make clear how disability has historically been disavowed—and avowed too. Thus, this book models how modern ideas and terms make the weight of the past more visible as it marks the present, and cultivates dialogue in which early modern and contemporary theoretical models are mutually informative.

Beholding Disability also uncovers crucial counterdiscourses circulating in the English Renaissance that opposed cultural fantasies of ability and had a keen sensibility toward non-normative embodiments. Hobgood reads impairments as varied as epilepsy, stuttering, disfigurement, deafness, chronic pain, blindness, and castration in order to understand not just powerful fictions of ability present during the Renaissance but also the somewhat paradoxical, surprising ways these ableist ideals provided creative fodder for many Renaissance writers and thinkers. Ultimately, Beholding Disability asks us to reconsider what we think we know about being human both in early modernity, and today.

 

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • A Note on the Text
  • Introduction
  • 1. Early Modern Ideologies of Ability
  • 2. Making Gains
  • 3. Prosthetic Possibilities
  • 4. Desiring Difference
  • 5. Disability Aesthetics and Conservation
  • Coda
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
Citable Link
Published: 2021
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-12857-0 (ebook)
  • 978-0-472-13236-2 (hardcover)
Series
  • Corporealities: Discourses of Disability
Subject
  • Medieval and Renaissance Studies
  • Literary Studies:European Literature
  • Disability Studies
  • Literary Studies:Literary Criticism and Theory

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This image is a two-dimensional, black-and-white sketch of a contoured, iron breastplate in two halves.

Image of iron breast-plate

From Chapter 2

Fig. 1. “The forme of an iron breast-plate, to amend the crookednesse of the Body.” Ambroise Paré, Workes, 1634. Dddd6v.

This image is a color painting of Jesus Christ wearing white robes below his naked torso. He stands looking out at the audience, pulling apart with his hands a bleeding wound in his right side.

Image of Christ displaying wounds

From Chapter 3

Fig. 2. Christ Displaying His Wounds. Giovanni Antonio Galli, gennant Lo Spadarino, ca. 1625/35. Canvas. 132.2 × 97.8 cm.

This image is a color photograph, taken by the author, of a handwritten manuscript page from the early modern play, “Looke About You

Image of page from Looke About You play

From Chapter 5

Fig. 3. A rare manuscript copy of A Pleasant Commodie, called Looke About You. Anon., London, 1600. Shelfmark Mal. 229 (5), L.

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