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  • Recovering Disability in Early Modern England ed. by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood
  • Sanner Garofalo
Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, ed. Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2013) 240 pp.

Recovering Disability in Early Modern England, edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, is a collected edition of essays which aims to introduce disability studies to the scholarly discussion of the early modern period, through its exploration of disability in early modern representations of nonnormative bodies and minds. Though disability studies is becoming increasingly prominent in both literary and historical fields, disability in early modern England has, until recently, been largely ignored in scholarly discussions, predominately because of both the difficulties in integrating modern ideas about disability with the cultural context of early modern England and the lack of concrete documentation about disability in the period. However, this collection highlights the usefulness and importance of this line of inquiry, demonstrating how disability studies intersects with and expands current critical trends such as new historicism and cultural materialism, as well as studies of selfhood, identity, difference, and the wonderful /marvelous / monstrous.

The essays in this collection interrogate a wide of range of cultural and literary representations of disability. In “Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser’s Faerie Queen and the Early Modern Court,” Sara van den Berg considers the links between Spenser’s figurative representation of dwarfs and their actual role in the early modern court, aligning the symbolic meaning prescribed to them in the courts with Spenser’s allegorical representation of these figures. Emily Bowles, in “Maternal Culpability in Fetal Defects: Aphra Behn’s Satiric Interrogations of Medical Models,” similarly focuses on a stigmatized body in early modern England – that of the female, as she explores the intersection of sexuality and disability in Aphra Behn’s prose narratives and her larger commentary about the social and medical understanding of femininity. David M. Turner, in “Disability Humor and the Meanings of Impairment in Early Modern England,” shifts the collection’s focus to cheap print, analyzing the potential of disability humor in Renaissance jest books to elucidate the early modern conception of disability, as well as the lived experiences of the disabled in early modern England. [End Page 315] The disabled mind is additionally considered in Lindsey Row-Heyveld’s “Antic Dispositions: Mental and Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Revenge Tragedies.” In this essay, Row-Heyveld positions madness as a disability and, in doing so, investigates how insanity is dramatically used to enable an audience’s moral acceptance of the principles inherent in the early modern revenge tragedy. Like van den Berg, Rachel E. Hile, in “Disabiling Allegories in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” also focuses on Spenser’s deployment of impaired allegorical figures. However, like “Antic Dispositions,” her essay is predominately concerned with genre and audience response, as she demonstrates how Spenser employs these disabled characters in order to evoke a specific and markedly negative emotional impulse from his readers. Simone Chess, in “Performing Blindness: Representing Disability in Early Modern Popular Performance and Print,” combines discussions of drama and cheap print, as she examines the embodied experience of blindness as represented in both mediums and the complexities which arise from such depictions. Lauren Coker, in “‘There is no suff’ring due’: Metatheatricality and Disability Drag in Volpone,” is similarly concerned with the material body. In this essay, she explores the complexities of feigned disability in Jonson’s play and its role in reinforcing doubt about the lived materiality of disability. Marcela Kostihova, in “Richard Recast: Renaissance Disability in a Postcommunist Culture,” adds performance studies and political appropriation to the collection’s scope, through her consideration of a postcommunist performance of Richard III in the Czech Republic which both capitalized on and pushed the implications of Richard’s famed deformity through its casting of a disabled actor in the title role. In “The Book of Common Prayer, Theory of Mind, and Autism in Early Modern England, Mardy Philippan, Jr. combines modern cognitive theory with a consideration of the Book of Common Prayer and its function in early modern England, arguing that the text can be interpreted as an instance of...

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