C. F. Goodey has written an interesting and thought-provoking monograph on intelligence and the lack thereof. He has an easy, enjoyable style, and is not afraid to play with ideas, both constructs from the present and the past—Early Modern, in particular, but those stand cheek-by-jowl with ancient, medieval, and modern illustrations. At times humorous, at its core A History of Intelligence and "Intellectual Disability" examines what Goodey calls "status modes" of honor, grace, and intelligence. His premise is that people naturally want their public face to be presented in the best light, and to that end they engage in "status bidding," using these modes to either build themselves up or tear others down around them so that they appear brighter. He writes, "My starting hypothesis, therefore, is that intelligence and intellectual disability, likewise intelligent people and intellectually disabled people, are not natural kinds but historically contingent forms of human self-representation and social reciprocity, of relatively recent historical origin" (2).

In his theory of "status bidding," Goodey explains that the intellectual bid is only one part of the "meritocratic mind-set" (63), which is the vying for status based on real or conceptual wealth, lineage, and learning. An individual's social status or honor might be a matter of his birthright (e.g., "my great aunt's second cousin was a Duke or I am completely chaste" [64]). An [End Page 302] individual also had religious status or grace; perhaps they had the financial means to support the church, buying religious clout. Other scholars have studied these concepts' social and religious status, but Goodey adds this new layer of a status of intelligence to the mix. "In our own meritocratic mind-set, intelligence too belongs on this level; it is something to be called upon as concrete collateral when claiming status, and is assumed to compete for recognition on the same taxonomic level with (for example) wealth" (64). Goodey's argument is strong. He makes the claim for this model in both directions—from the path of those who move up and from the path of those who keep others down. On the one hand, those performing well at education, demonstrating not only knowledge or collected information but also speed at recall or tasks, have social collateral, and with that can become upwardly mobile. On the other hand, "When [Richard] Mulcaster [Elizabeth's education policy adviser] discusses his own school's admissions policy, he seems uncharacteristically muddled." Discussing "the difference of wits" in children, he writes about the "natural ability" of the gentry and the "natural towardness" of the "non-gentle" (78). Goodey impresses upon his reader that Early Modern society worked at keeping the low in status down. Those without the advantage of wealth should not, in the minds of the Early Modern "haves" (as opposed to the "have-nots"), be given ways to bring up their social standing only to compete in a world they would not understand.

When women or "non-gentle persons" were lifted up, given an education, it "was to remove honour from men and to strip reason of its inherent maleness." Goodey puts it well when he writes, "As with class, so with gender" (97). Females were given little encouragement to become educated persons. They were slighted not only as the "weaker" sex but also as being much like the poor—in medieval and Early Modern terms—"base" in their abilities, comparable only to children.

In terms of disabled intelligence and not simply monetarily poor social standing—the idiota, for example—Goodey implies that those unable to think well (clear and fast) cannot compete for higher status. He examines ideas surrounding fast and slow thinking from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, contrasting the time and labor or effort involved in a task. John Locke wrote and Goodey quotes, "he defined wit as 'the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness,' [Locke] was more concerned about the mean, and the pathology of 'wrong judgment' that lay on both sides of it. There is 'heat and passion' on one side and 'sloth' on the other" (59). An individual had to arrive at the correct answer at near the same time as others of his social standing; he could not be of "slow" intelligence. Further, he could not be a poor judge of things, letting his enthusiasm drive his decisions or his idiocy. [End Page 303]

According to Goodey, in Renaissance and Early Modern society, along with having honor and intelligence, a person should not be "reprobate" but demonstrate "grace." With the onset of the concept of the "elect" in many Early Modern protestant movements, reprobate became the opposite of the electorate. An Early Modern individual was to use his mind to understand the good, to understand God's grace. The reprobate "out group" did not necessarily include the mentally incapacitated. Some believed that because they thought like children, they might be included in heaven as children; while others thought that both groups, children and the mentally incapacitated, were damned.

Goodey at times puts too much emphasis on finding the roots in the medieval world of what he sees as the connection between Early Modern thinking on this topic and the modern psychology movement. Goodey writes at length about the medieval idiota. "The early church fathers used idiota to mean someone lacking religious wisdom. . . . Albert [Albertus Magnus] described idiotae more precisely as people who 'do not discern the universal from particulars,' i.e. those who do not make abstractions" (126). Yet, even without understanding the subtleties of the medieval terminology, Goodey comes to the same conclusions as many medieval disability scholars: that the medieval English term idiota came to be used "as birth-to-death permanence" in the fifteenth century. Goodey writes as if guardianships were on the rise at the end of the Middle Ages because of a growing use of the Court of Wards, but what actually happened was a shift from the royal courts and royal administration, especially in the person of the escheator, ordering wardship for idiotae or other mentally incompetent persons to a mechanism by which these same people began to be seen at the Court of Wards. This shift is quickly followed by another: the growing use of "Bedlam" hospitals and other places to incarcerate those idiotae and others with mental incapacities, which Goodey does not discuss more than in passing.

Goodey uses modern terminology well, mostly to explain in common parlance concepts of the past; nevertheless, the purist should be warned. Goodey uses terms such as Down's syndrome, genetics, DNA, and IQ throughout the work, cautious not to apply these terms to the past, but as a comparative element. For example, "If a time-travelling doctor from this period were to hear our cognitive geneticists talking about DNA as the cause of intelligence or disability, he would bracket them with the proponents of fate or predestination rather than nature" (153). In another example, as he moves toward the modern concepts of psychology, Goodey writes, "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), for example, exists because in the 1980s the American Psychiatric Association disputed and then elected a list of symptoms, eventually agreeing—it went to a second vote—to abide by the result" (214). [End Page 304]

I expected this to be a different kind of book—yet, that speaks of my own bias toward the words "intelligence," "disability," and "intellectual." I flipped immediately to the bibliography and was disappointed to find no references to Irina Metler, Joshua Eyler, Julie Singer, Tory Pearman, or others working on medieval disability studies, including myself. Nevertheless, I was more than pleasantly surprised that the more I read, the more I liked this book. It is obviously the product of an intellectual—someone who has thought long and deeply about the topic of social, religious, and cultural implications of the concepts of intelligence and the lack of mental capacity. And, to be fair, most of the works by the authors I mentioned above have come out in the last few years. It could be that they were not widely available when Goodey was finishing this wonderful monograph.

This book belongs on the shelves of all those interested in the history of mental health, disability studies, and the history of intelligence and psychology. It is accessible to a sophisticated undergraduate population. I recommend it highly.