Recovering Disability in Early Modern England ed. by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood (review)

This valuable and timely collection addresses the growing interest in disability studies in premodern literature. Allison Hobgood and David Houston Wood have gathered a rich cross-section of essays on a variety of early modern English texts. This collection adds to a growing list of works in the young and exciting field of disability studies. Notable collections have come out of the University of Michigan series, New York University Press, and the well-respected Ohio State University Press series of which this collection is a part. This is the first collection that I know of, however, that treats early modern English disability specifically. Most previous collections that do include essays on early modern topics have evinced a broad chronological scope that has been useful to the reader seeking a wider view of the manifestations of disability representation (primarily in the West). An advantage of Hobgood and Wood’s collection, by contrast, is the coherence of linguistic and geographical as well as chronological scope that helps it to cohere.

Hobgood and Wood’s introduction, “Ethical Staring: Disabling the English Renaissance,” moves beyond a typical historical catalogue of data about the treatment—both medical and social—of people with disabilities in the past. Drawing on recent work on the concept of “staring” by eminent disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, the introduction claims that employing a more ethical and sustained engagement with the past can help us to deepen our understanding of early modern representations of disability and to improve our knowledge of constructions of disability now. Hobgood and Wood provide a useful overview of the development of disability studies, from the 1980s civil rights roots of the field through the reassessment of medicalized models of disability in favor of social and cultural models of impairment and disability, recent investigations of disability aesthetics and its cultural meanings, and the turn away from an identity politics model of disability in search of a more inclusive and intersectional model favoring a postmodern and postcolonial worldview. The introduction’s resistance to exclusive historical résumé in favor of theoretical and field-defining concepts frames the essays to come and provides, in its own right, a scholarly contribution to the conversation about how disability was itself framed by early modern people. The only potential drawback here is that the variety of genres and methodological approaches (which I deem a strongpoint of the collection) makes it difficult to place the essays in a thematic narrative, so readers should feel free to read these essays in whichever order they choose.

The collection opens with Sara van den Berg’s well-substantiated “Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Early Modern Court,” which treats the manifestations of the neglected, yet significant, dwarf characters in Edmund Spenser’s masterpiece and locates these figures in the larger context of the Elizabethan court’s highly politicized aesthetics. This essay is a valuable contribution to both scholars of disability and to Spenserians, and it is a welcome addition to scholarship on the historical and literary lives of dwarfs in the period.

In chapter 2, “Maternal Culpability in Fetal Defects: Aphra Behn’s Satiric Interrogations of Medical Models,” Emily Bowles investigates the links between gender and disability in the hands of a female writer. She considers how the medical notion of female defectiveness and the alleged role of the female imagination in the conception of physically impaired children is turned to satire in Behn’s prose piece, The Dumb Virgin. From satire in the seventeenth century the collection moves back to the beginnings of the jest book genre in early sixteenth-century England with David Turner’s fascinating essay, “Disability Humor and the Meanings of Impairment in Early Modern England.” Rather than using evidence of the mockery of disabled people in premodern culture as an uncomplicated sign of modern progress, he masterfully argues that although “jokes have historically...