Early Modern Neurodiversity: A Preliminary Research Agenda

Abstract

Though scholars of early modern England have become increasingly interested in the topic of disability, there has been relatively less attention devoted to issues relating to what theorists call neurodivergence—that is, types of psychological and cognitive processing variance that result in a mind's non-normative relationship to the world it inhabits, as in experiences designated Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADD/ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Tourette Syndrome, and so on. This essay sets out a research agenda for early modern neurodiversity studies by surveying the important foundational work that does exist and by establishing a conceptual map of where this emerging field might go.

In the last two decades, literary critics and cultural historians of early modern England have become increasingly interested in the topic of disability: engaging the broader interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies (and more specifically, Critical Disability Studies), scholars working in this mode have produced a number of agenda-setting articles, monographs, and essay collections, exploring the intricate ways that physically and intellectually disabled bodies both existed and were represented in the English Renaissance.¹ While this work valuably analyzes a vast number of disabling factors—ranging from things that impact sight, hearing, speech, and mobility—there has been considerably less attention devoted to issues relating to what theorists call neurodivergence—that is, types of cognitive, emotional, and sensory processing variance that result in a mind's non-normative relationship to the world it inhabits, as in (to name just a few examples) the ways of being that modern diagnosis designates Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADD/ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Tourette Syndrome, and so on. Recently, however, groundbreaking scholars like Mardy Philippian, Sonya Freeman Loftis, Lisa Ulevich, Wes Folkerth, Jes Battis, Nicholas R. Helms, Laura Seymour, Jessica Secmezsoy-Urquhart, Olivia Henderson, and Melinda Marks have indeed begun to explore particular matters of neurodivergence in early modern England; their efforts are such that we may now rightly talk about the developing subfield of early modern neurodiversity studies, an area of research that promises to considerably contribute to our understanding of the early modern world and the people who inhabited it.²

Though Bradley J. Irish has written an initial overview of early modern neurodiversity studies for The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, there has been little attempt to account for this emerging field generally.³ Drawing on both our background as early modern scholars and our lived experience as autistic persons—two identities that jointly shape our particular relationships to historical neurodiversity and neurodivergence—we offer in what follows a preliminary overview of how sensitivity to neurodiversity can help us think about the literature and culture of the English Renaissance.⁴ (We focus on early modern England, because that is our area of research expertise: but the points of our discussion equally apply in other early modern literary and historical traditions.) We aim for breadth, not depth; rather than fully plumb particular topics or examples, we cast a deliberately wide net, with the goal of establishing a range of analysis that might serve the study of early modern neurodiversity and neurodivergence. As such, we will take stock of existing scholarship in the area, mapping certain pathways first cut by the scholars named above; we will also attempt to cut some paths of our own, via fresh consideration of Renaissance neurodiversity and engagement with research on literary neurodiversity located outside the chronological boundaries of the early modern period. In doing so, we hope to synthesize existing work and offer a flexible, multi-purposed agenda for scholars interested in this developing subfield—one that promises to shed a new light not only on early modern disability, but on the early modern world more generally. In light of the vital, growing interdisciplinary interest in neurodiversity studies, we argue that it is now time for scholars of the English Renaissance to wholeheartedly embrace this promising area of inquiry, and incorporate the study of neurodiversity and neurodivergence into their broader literary and cultural analysis. The present essay serves as an encouragement for this task and offers some initial avenues for approaching it.

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We must begin, of course, with working definitions of neurodiversity and neurodivergence. Neurodiversity, put simply, refers to the fact that human minds, and the bodies that they are entwined with, naturally vary in the ways that they work; practically speaking, this means that different individuals have different ways of producing and experiencing things like cognition, emotion, and sensation. Neurodiversity is a basic reality of our species' existence; human minds are individuated like human fingerprints, and human neurological diversity is infinite.

There is a massive complication, however. Despite the enormous amount of neurological difference in our species, some roughly similar kinds of cognitive, emotional, and sensory styles tend to occur more frequently in human populations than others—and particular cultural contexts tend to naturalize these ways of being as the supposed human "norm," meaning that less common neurological styles are pathologized as being "abnormal," "wrong," or something in need of a "cure." Though physicians and philosophers have explicitly considered neurocognitive variance in terms of value-neutral difference rather than pathology since at least the early nineteenth-century, modern neurodiversity theory now designates these less typical styles as forms of neurodivergence, in that they diverge from a culture's presumed neurological norm—and theorists crucially stress that non-normative forms of neurological being should be emphasized "as difference (neurodivergence) from common (neurotypical) forms of cognitive functioning rather than as pathologized disorders."⁵ This "specific perspective on neurodiversity," in which the phenomenon is viewed as "a natural and valuable form of human diversity," is distinguished by Nick Walker as the neurodiversity paradigm.⁶ In this way, neurodiversity "provides an inclusive view of cognitive diversity," which "consolidate[s] neurobiological differences with evolving sociocultural contexts of human experiences."⁷ Neurodiversity and the neurodiversity paradigm, then, reflect the entire range of cognitive, emotional, and sensory experiences within human populations, whereas neurodivergence refers more specifically to those experiences that deviate from the norm.

Precisely which kinds of variance count as neurodivergent is a matter of ongoing dispute among activists and academics alike; we aim to use neurodivergence and its adjectival form neurodivergent here in a way that reflects the usual emphases of neurodiversity discourse and also popular understanding of what the words mean. In other words, our focus will be on developmental and otherwise neurocognitively-based differences such as those now organized under such diagnostic rubrics as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia. Such conditions, neurodiversity advocates have historically argued, do not entail any inherent (that is, not imposed from outside by a hostile ableist environment) suffering or limitations of flourishing, and they have been at the heart of neurodiversity scholarship and activism; their inclusion under the label neurodivergence is undisputed and they appear with the most frequency by far in the literature on neurodiversity. The focus on these differences, it is important to recognize, tends to sideline other instances of neurocognitive variation such as dementia and traumatic brain injury. Further, some authors hold that neurodivergence refers to all forms of mental difference, including mental illness, while others wish to make a distinction that excludes forms of atypical enmindedness primarily cast as psychiatric disorders from the category of neurodivergent. Still others take more nuanced approaches that continue to center cognitive differences such as autism and ADHD in discussions of neurodivergence but acknowledge that no consistent and firm division separates psychiatric and neurocognitive experiences of non-normativity.⁸ And the problems with exclusive definitions of neurodivergence are even more pronounced when we consider neurodivergence in connection with a time period that did not share our current taxonomies of difference and standards of normalcy. With these points in mind, we therefore focus on those neurological—and often especially neurodevelopmental—kinds of difference most consistently associated with the terms when we refer to neurodivergence and neurodiversity, but do not foreclose engagement with types of mental difference that every reader may not associate with the term.⁹

While the neurodiversity paradigm is most often applied to modern minds, it also provides a useful starting point for the analysis of neurodiversity in earlier historical periods. With a similar commitment to the inclusivity of experience, we first suggest that scholars can tentatively locate early modern neurodivergence in historical and literary accounts that record or depict non-normative (or simply less common) forms of cognitive, emotional, and sensory experience—including elements like behavior, processing, and perception. Katherine Schaap Williams has demonstrated that attending to the idea of disability even where disabled people are absent sheds new light on early modern culture overall, and Michael Bérubé has demonstrated the utility of intellectual disability as a lens for studying narrative (whether or not they involve characters with intellectual disabilities).¹⁰ While we hope that early modern neurodiversity studies can likewise produce critical work that reflects back on other subjects of literary and cultural study—perhaps rendering neuronormativity visible and facilitating critical approaches to taken-for-granted neurotypicality—we mainly focus here on the basic work of acknowledging early modern neurodiversity and the historical presence of neurodivergent persons and characters. As will become apparent, such cognitive, psychological, and social differences can be assessed from two very different perspectives: that is, we may encounter neurological depictions that strike the modern researcher as non-normative—as, for example, when a text records experiences and behaviors recalling those that would seemingly identify a twenty-first-century individual as autistic—or, we may encounter neurological depictions that strike the historical observer as non-normative—as, for example, when English Renaissance writers use their own contemporary psychological understanding to describe deviations in various population groups (categorized by factors like gender or race) that would not necessarily seem valid from a modern standpoint. (And in many cases, of course, a representation might strike both the modern researcher and the historical observer as non-normative.)

Furthermore, it is vital to recognize that human neurological functioning cannot exist independently from the social environment that helps construct it: minds are inherently "biocultural" entities, in the sense that they inevitably develop and manifest within a social context.¹¹ Because of this—and, because we know from modern science that neurodivergence can have intricate social implications—we may extend our inquiry further, to consider the possibility of neurodivergence in representations of non-normative ways of engaging the social world that may be inflected, but not fully accounted for, by other more familiar markers of identity like gender, class, race, and sexuality. That is to say, neurodivergence may be present in cases of culturally atypical psychological and social behaviors, when that atypicality cannot be entirely explained by the other personal identity characteristics that shape one's experience in the world. Once again, the identification of neurodivergence in such instances must be tentative, and not proscriptive: but these are nonetheless conditions in which neurodivergence might be present, and which warrant further investigation.

As should be clear, an inclusive approach to early modern neurodiversity means a creative willingness to entertain the possibility of neurodivergence in representations of historical experience, even when the available evidence is ambiguous, conflicting, or incomplete. What should also be apparent, however, is that the goal of such investigation is not to proscriptively "diagnose" early modern people (either real or imagined) with any sort of particular label or conditions—especially since the language and conceptualization of neurodivergence are almost entirely modern phenomena. For nearly 40 years, historicist scholarship on early modern psychology has warned us against such anachronism—and this is with good reason.¹² Yet, at the same time, it seems unreasonable to think that human psychological—and more specifically, neurological—functioning is solely determined by a culture's explicitly available conceptual discourses, and it is certainly clear that we can identify points of roughly analogous similarity between forms of experience captured by the modern understanding of neurodivergence and the forms of experience that we encounter in the historical record.¹³ (Marks and Irish account for such analogy via the concept of neurotypes.)¹⁴ For this reason, we will see, scholars working on literary neurodivergence more broadly feel comfortable exploring the tentative possibility that textual and historical persons exhibit tendencies that may align, for example, with the modern understanding of autism or embody nonstandard minds in any number of idiosyncratic ways. Furthermore, even when not framed in modern diagnostic criteria and terminology, early modern neurodivergence can still be inferred from the representation of a particular behavioral phenotype—that is, "the characteristic cognitive, personality, behavioral, and psychiatric pattern" associated with a form of difference—and early modern observers themselves were perfectly able to recognize certain non-normative patterns of personal being, even if they did not describe them in the same way that we do.¹⁵ Finally, in an even more basic sense, the concept of neurodiversity can be, to borrow a famous phrase, "good to think with"—it can help us discover new ways of analyzing early modern lived experience and the texts that represent it. There is no cost to trying such a reading on for size, regardless of whether an apparent instance of early modern neurodivergence can ultimately be proven or confirmed; considering an early modern text in terms of neurodivergence still has the potential to help us perceive otherwise obscure features. In summation, we thus argue that taking a tentative, flexible, and creative approach—rather than a rigid and diagnostic one—provides an ethically and intellectually valid way of approaching research on historical neurodivergence—one that, we suggest, will generate new understandings of early modern textual and historical lives.

Finally, it is important to say something about the relationship of neurodivergence to three other key concepts. The first is the category of disability. For good reason, neurodivergence is often positioned under the category of disability, because for many, if not most, neurodivergent people it entails impairment. But, at the same time, Walker explains how neurodivergence cannot just be synonymous with disability or impairment; for example, "the majority of people who experience synesthesia aren't impaired by it in any significant way," and other neurodivergent traits (such as hyperlexia and exceptional memory) are often advantageous.¹⁶ But while these variances from typical cognitive functions may not result in something we can easily recognize as disability, they are nonetheless forms of human existence that depart in significant ways from biocultural standards, and thus neurodiversity has been commonly positioned under the larger category of disability. Disability as we understand it today did not exist per se in the early modern world, but scholars such as Elizabeth Bearden, David M. Turner, and Susannah B. Mintz have demonstrated that a disability lens can be brought to bear fruitfully on a wide array of 16th- and 17th-century human exceptionalities even beyond those most commonly classed as disabilities.¹⁷

The second concept is specifically intellectual disability. As stated above, the critical analysis of neurodivergence emerges from the larger framework of disability studies, and it makes sense that scholars working on the topic would often find themselves linked to those working on other forms of Renaissance disability. Trickier to parse, however, is the specific relationship of neurodivergence overall to early modern intellectual disability, a topic that has been valuably considered by scholars like Lindsey Row-Heyveld, C. F. Goodey, and Alice Equestri. Put simply, intellectual disability is generally understood to refer to developmental conditions marked by significant deficits in those mental capabilities conventionally understood to comprise intellect—thus intellectual disability is a form of neurodivergence, but not all forms of neurodivergence are intellectual disabilities.¹⁸

Thirdly, it is important to distinguish neurodivergence from mental illness conceptually, despite their overlaps and mutual sympathies. Mad studies should be a guiding light for early modern neurodiversity studies and a key interlocutory field as our own develops, so it is crucial that we both establish how it differs and thereby support a respectful and productive interchange. Additionally, this distinction is especially important for our present purposes, given the robust, perennial interest that early modern scholars have had in topics like madness. Neurodivergence and mental illness indeed often co-occur—in the context of intellectual disabilities, for example, this co-occurrence is called dual diagnosis—and their traits can overlap—both can cause cognitive impairment—but they are not quite identical; mental illness is a vast category that includes various psychological states that occur throughout the lifespan.¹⁹ As both are psychological conditions, there is once again good reason for neurodivergence and mental illness to sometimes be considered jointly in the larger category of disability—but a delineation between the two may also be advised, depending on context. In summation, when it comes to the theoretical entanglements of early modern neurodiversity studies, flexibility and inclusivity are the best critical practices. The field shares considerable theoretical terrain with early modern disability studies and early modern mad studies—and indeed, many working on neurodiversity or neurodivergence will, with good reason, anchor their work in disability and mad studies—but the areas are not simply identical, and there thus will be occasions when a particular scholar will find strategic reason to emphasize their mutual investments to a greater or lesser extent.

With these definitions in mind, we will now move to consider some possible ways of considering neurodivergence in literary and historical representations of early modern lived experience. The goal, to restate, is to be inclusive, and to provide the widest possibility of encountering neurodivergent historical forms while operating with our working definitions; once again, our emphasis is on flexibility and creativity in analysis, to reflect the particular singularities of the topic.

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In the last ten years, there have been certain characteristic ways that literary scholars have engaged with the matters of neurodiversity and neurodivergence; Irish outlines them generally in Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions (2025).²⁰ Perhaps the primary method has been considering fictional characters who may, for whatever reason, be thought to be neurodivergent. This most obviously includes characters in more contemporary works who are explicitly identified as so—as in the autistic protagonists of Elizabeth Moon's The Speed of Dark (2002) or Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time (2003)—but it also reflects characters from historical texts that seem to be coded in a way that may correspond to the modern sense of neurodivergence—figures such as Perceval, Frankenstein's Monster, Jane Eyre, Mr. Darcy, Bartleby the Scrivener, Sherlock Holmes, and Benjy Compson.²¹ A decade ago, Paul Cefalu considered Iago in terms of autism; in a cognitive reading of Othello, he observes that "Iago's symptoms … perhaps place him along the autism spectrum," whose selective hyper-attunement to others would place him on "an extreme end of the autism scale as an example of a high-functioning autistic who perhaps suffers from 'intense world syndrome.'"²² While Helms has critiqued Cefalu's use of cognitive theory—and while Cefalu himself notes that settling on "such static cognitive diagnoses would lead to an interpretive dead end"—it is still possible to similarly consider early modern literary and cultural representations of neurodivergence, in a way that opens, rather than closes, interpretative possibilities.²³

As we will see, there are many individual Renaissance characters who might be considered in terms of neurodiversity—but it also is valuable, at the outset, to think about neurodivergence in kinds of characters. As noted above, neurodivergence is sometimes considered in terms of behavioral phenotypes—or in terms of neurotypes—so it makes sense that certain kinds of archetypal figures in the period might be particularly associated with atypical cognition, psychology, and behavior.²⁴ Because of this, it has become increasingly clear, for example, that the discourse surrounding Fools and Clowns is a crucial context for studying early modern neurodiversity. Though scholars like Goodey and Equestri have more broadly considered folly in terms of intellectual disability, those working explicitly on the broader category of early modern neurodivergence have also placed fools at the center of their analysis. Folkerth, for example, states that the "remarkable thing about Shakespeare's clowns and fools is how individuated they are, how diverse they are in their humanity"; he treats the archetypal representations of fools in Robert Armin's Foole Upon Foole or Six Sortes of Sottes alongside Speed from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to argue that "reading Shakespeare after neurodiversity not only means reading his fools and clowns with an attention to their surprisingly striking individuality [but also] with an historically-informed sense of how intelligence could be defined in the period differently than it is now."²⁵ Helms, in an autobiographical essay, uses Feste—"an intellectual vagrant, analytical to a fault"—to help understand neurodivergence.²⁶ Finally, Secmezsoy-Urquhart's dissertation adopts a historical perspective, to offer "the first study of neurodiverse natural fools who became Scottish court fools."²⁷

While these efforts have set the stage for the study of the neurodivergent fool, there is still much opportunity for further analysis. The six real-life natural fools profiled in Armin's book are themselves distinct from one another; the individuation sometimes found in early modern representations of fools is an important corrective to a longstanding critical presumption that "fool" was a monolithic category made up of persons each wholly defined by an identical and self-evident intellectual deficit. Armin's fools have different temperaments, particular quirks, and varied relationships with the other people in their communities. Foole Upon Foole challenges a simple equation of folly with lack of recognizable "intelligence," especially by numbering Henry VIII's jester Will Somers among the six and yet portraying him as extremely clever.²⁸

The embeddedness of fools within communities, which Armin reflects in Foole Upon Foole and also his stage comedy The History of the Two Maids of More-Clacke (1609), is itself a significant point worth noting. We may be drawn to jesters and court fools when we consider natural folly as a culturally significant form of neurodivergence in the early modern world, but as Simon Jarrett emphasizes, cognitively disabled individuals generally lived as more or less integrated members of their local communities until the rise of institutions for the "feebleminded" during the industrial revolution.²⁹ While the lodging of fools in madhouses is staged in both Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) and John Fletcher's The Pilgrim (1621), these practices seem to have had very little basis in real life, and we might look for neurodivergent folly in the mundanities of early modern reality.³⁰ Those "fools" who lived and worked in wealthy households as entertainers, meanwhile, were neurotypical (or neurotypical-passing) performers called "artificial fools" at least as often as they were so-called "natural fools." Alice Equestri points out that because artificial fools performed as though they were natural fools, studying artificials is still a valuable method for studying early modern intellectual disability.³¹ (Furthermore, Walker explains that queering neuronormativity is in fact something that people of all neurotypes can choose to do.)³² The neurodivergence of those deemed naturally foolish, or even simply eccentric but not mad, was often a part of the fabric of daily life, and we might enlarge our understanding of neurodivergent "folly" by looking to the regularities of the early modern world as well as its spectacles.

The Renaissance Fool may be the most obvious literary type that invites the consideration of neurodivergence—but there are, however, other kinds of figures that can also be fruitfully explored in terms of atypical neurological functioning. One example is the case of the early modern malcontent—a character particularly familiar from Renaissance drama. In her analysis of 19th-century Russian literature, Ingeborg Jandl explores neurodivergence in the period's "superfluous man" topos—a figure marked by "emotional reserve, avoiding personal attachment, provocative disrespect of social graces, independence, unforeseen decisions and condescension towards others"—but she crucially notes that the popularity of this archetype was "motivated by the success of Molière's Misanthrope (1666) on the Russian stages."³³ Molière's protagonist, of course, is one of the central malcontents of the European Renaissance, so it makes sense that we might equally explore neurodivergence in light of the era's other manifestations. Indeed, some work in this vein has already started; Melissa H. Geil, for example, has explored Don John of Much Ado About Nothing in terms of autistic masking, while Seymour is currently working on a project that centers the lived experience of neurodivergence in the reading of Hamlet.³⁴ (Iago, who we saw associated with neurodivergence above, has also recently been read as a malcontent.)³⁵ But other possibilities remain. In early modern England, malcontentment was understood as a particular quality of the mind—as in comments on "the malcontented and dispayring minde," or the "moodie mind of [a] malecontented king"—so it makes sense to investigate the habitually discontented person in terms of cognitive divergence.³⁶ William Shakespeare's Timon, for example, undergoes a kind of cognitive and behavioral change in his self-exile from Athens; what would it mean to understand his social atypicality in terms of neurodivergence? (This analysis might build upon the work of Henderson, who has provocatively associated Coriolanus's complex relationship to Roman social norms in terms of autism.) Row-Heyveld has explored intellectual disability via the madness trope in early modern revenge tragedies, but it's also possible to consider the disaffection of characters like Middleton's Vindice, John Webster's Bosola, and John Marston's Malevole in terms of non-normative intellectual and social orientation.³⁷ Finally, given that "Malcontent" was often used in the period as a political slur against one's enemies, we might more broadly see how historical charges of malcontentedness help construct social outsiders as non-normative or divergent in texts across the Renaissance.³⁸ To this end, Marks and Irish have recently advocated for a "typological" approach to early modern neurodiversity and neurodivergence, which leverages how contemporaries tended to see certain "types" of people (real or fictional) as often characterized by common forms of cognitive, emotional, and sensory functioning.³⁹ Once again, considering the early modern characters in this way requires a flexible and creative approach to neurodivergence—but this is consistent with what we have recommended throughout.

Speaking of creativity, there is another crucial way that literary neurodivergence can be explored, beyond the investigation of character types associated with intellectual and social non-normativity. Modern scholars often speak of "neurological style" when analyzing neurodivergence—a tendency that invites us to think about the intriguing possibility of neurodivergent literary style.⁴⁰ Stylistic atypicality is another instance that demands a flexible view of neurodivergence, but it is one that presents real opportunities; Julia Miele Rodas, for example, has begun to valuably theorize autistic poetics, and this impulse can fruitfully inform early modern studies.⁴¹ In the basic sense, there is clear alliance between the study of neurodivergent characters and neurodivergent style; a primary reason for positing a Fool's neurodivergence is because of the precise way in which they express themselves.⁴² Particular stylistic traits and habits thus can signal neurodivergence. Seymour, for example, examines how the Bastard of King John employs echolalia in his dialogue—a "speech pattern involving repetition of words and phrases" that has been specifically linked to autism.⁴³ While "ableist norms represent rhythmic autistic speech as 'gabbling,'" Seymour reveals "the ways echolalia works rhetorically, prosodically, and socio-politically," allowing us to ultimately view the Bastard's language in terms of "a joyful and generative autistic rhetoricity."⁴⁴ Representations of atypical speech by particular literary characters thus provide an obvious avenue for the consideration of neurodivergent style.

But beyond fictive individuals, we can more broadly find literary reflections of atypical cognitive style at the level of text or author. It is well known that neurodivergent minds often have atypical qualities of language processing and usage, and it seems clear that there might be parallels at the level of literary presentation.⁴⁵ Can we not, for instance, find a kind of linguistic non-normativity in euphuism, the ornate literary style marked by "antithetical balance, promoted by the use of schemes or figures of sound, notably isocolon (the repetition of clauses of the same length), parison (similarly structured sentences) and paramoion (sound patterning, e.g. syllabic repetition, assonance and alliteration"?⁴⁶ This is not to claim, of course, that John Lyly and his imitators were themselves neurodivergent—but it is still possible to identify a cognitive and linguistic novelty in the euphuistic narrator that recalls the discourse of neurodiversity. And can we not see the workings of a non-normative cognitive style in the "shockingly new … method of presentation" offered by the seven infamous Martin Marprelate tracts, documents that were stylistically marked by "wittily irreverent and conversational prose, ironic modes of argument, fluid shifts among narrative voices, [and] playful experiments with the conventions of print controversy"?⁴⁷ These are just two cases, but the possibility remains with many particular kinds of literary examples. Accordingly, tending to unique kinds of early modern style—especially kinds of style that obviously diverge from their contemporary norms—is another way to consider Renaissance literary neurodivergence, quite apart from the method of assessing particular characters or character types.

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The analysis of character and stylistic types presents a ready avenue for the study of early modern literary neurodiversity and neurodivergence. But to fully understand the period's literary neurodiversity, we must also look beyond the strict realm of imaginative literature, to more broadly investigate cultural representatives of atypical cognitive, emotional, and sensory style. (And, as we will see, these cultural representations will themselves inform the study of particular literary characters.) The first thing to say is that contemporary understandings of embodied physiology inherently recognize a degree of diversity and flux in psychological and mental composition; as we know from scholars of early modern humoral theory, many Renaissance thinkers envisioned a materially (that is, elementally) porous boundary between the environment and self, and the era's notion of embodiment must be understood "in terms that challenge the post-Cartesian divisions between thought, soma, and world."⁴⁸ The humoral body, in turn, is "characterized not only by its physical openness but also by its emotional instability and volatility"—individuals were thought to possess "an internal microclimate" known "more for changeability than for stasis."⁴⁹ The idea of a normative mental architecture, then, is somewhat tricky in the period—and indeed, there is opportunity to consider variance in the humoral embodied mind—or, in other words, a humoral model of what Margaret Price calls the bodymind—in terms of what we'd now call neurodiversity.⁵⁰ Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood, in fact, speak of "[t]he normative states of flux and volatility that characterize early modern selfhood within humoral theory."⁵¹

But despite this basic state of variance, it is also still possible to talk about cultural norms within the early modern understanding of lived experience, and what happens when those norms are troubled. As noted above, the implications of neurodivergence intersect with other more familiar markers of social identity, so it is especially vital to also consider this interaction. Gender, for example, is an important context for the consideration of early modern neurodivergence. Certain forms of neurological atypicality, we have seen, must be considered from the historical perspective of the early modern period, even if they would not adhere for us—and gender is implicated here, in the sense that Renaissance thinkers commonly maintained that compared to men, "the minds of women are the weaker."⁵² There is a sense, then, in which women as a category were understood as inherently neurodivergent, and contemporary misogynist discourse spent considerable time anatomizing the "desperat minde of wicked women."⁵³ The topic, for example, features in the opening moment of Joseph Swetnam's The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Vnconstant Women (1615) perhaps the era's most infamous text of misogyny:

Againe, in a manner, shee was no sooner made, but straightway her mind was set vpon mischiefe, for by her aspiring minde and wanton will, shee quickly procured mans fall, and therfore euer since they are and haue beene a woe vnto man, and follow the line of their first leader.⁵⁴

For Swetnam, a mind inclined to mischief is a defining feature of women, and sets the course for all subsequent gender relations: human history thus takes as a starting point Eve's misaligned mind. Many texts from the period equally comment on the perceived deficiencies of feminine cognition. Intellect, obviously, is one point of contention; "the minds of Women," it was thought by many, "are not inclined to studies," so their cognitive processes were thought lacking from the start.⁵⁵ Women's minds were routinely said to be marked by inconstancy; this is a regular feature of misogynist discourse in the period, and found popular expression in songs with lyrics like "For since that she hath chang'd her mind / Ile trust no more to women kind" and "if euer thou didst find, / a woman with a constant mind, none but one, and what should / that rare mirrour be, some Goddesse or some Queene."⁵⁶ Some women were equally said to possess "a wantons mind that is disposed to stray"—this is, one commentator observes, "the crueltie of women kind."⁵⁷ And sometimes, women even risked salvation itself—a complement to the complaint of Swetnam—because "the minde of a woman oppressed with passions and pleasures of this world, [will] lose the force, lust, and desire which shee had to the rest of eternall life to come."⁵⁸ While the inadequacies and limitations of the female mind weren't universally upheld—in the era's defenses of women, we find reference to "diuine and refined gold, whose Mine is the minde of a woman"—the ubiquity of this outlook nonetheless raises the intriguing possibility that early modern philosophical, theological, and scientific discourse understood women's minds to be inherently atypical, making them marked by a kind of neurodivergence.⁵⁹ The cognitive basis of Renaissance misogyny thus presents fascinating opportunity for gender analysis more broadly in the period.

But while women in general might be thought cognitively non-normative from an early modern perspective, there are also particular representations of women in the period that might suggest neurodivergence as the term is more precisely understood today. Though rarer than their male counterparts, female natural fools do appear in early modern texts.⁶⁰ One interesting example of such a "she-fool" is Silena in Lyly's comedy Mother Bombie, whose behaviors resonate with our modern concept of autism when she participates in a social interaction by speaking in repeated platitudes and when she struggles to adjust her register to specific contexts. (As noted above, characters we may read through an attunement to neurodivergence are frequently marked by distinct ways of speaking.) Another woman whose use of language singles her out as seemingly neurodivergent is Juliet's Nurse; her speeches—full of impulsivity, repetition, and social improprieties—bear a strong resemblance to the speech patterns now associated with ADHD. We do not mean to suggest that the distinctly modern definitions of autism and ADHD perfectly and objectively capture essential cognitive styles that transcend time and culture—but we do, however, underscore the fact that neurodivergent traits were a part of the repertoires of characterization, speech, and behavior available to early modern writers, and note that such traits could be attributed to female characters either as particular instances of neurodivergence or as reflections of a general kind of neurodivergence which was in fact normative for women if taken as their own category.

Furthermore, gender and the connected topic of sexuality are particularly important points for consideration given that we now know that neurodivergent individuals are significantly more likely than neurotypical individuals to have LGBTQ identities. Nick Walker's term neuroqueer is often used to capture the convergence of queerness and neurodivergence. In Walker's original usage, however, the word emerged as "an extension of the way queer is used as a verb in Queer Theory" so as "to encompass the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms."⁶¹ As Robert McRuer's concept of compulsory able-bodiedness illustrates, queerness and disability are thus structurally-related forms of non-normativity. Social norms and indeed normative socialization are often among the greatest challenges that face neurodivergent people; neuroqueer, with its multiple, flexible meanings, invites us to consider how early modern norms around sexuality and gender relate to or even produce, in a sense, early modern neurodivergence.⁶²

Beyond gender and sexuality, another important social context for neurodivergence is early modern views on race. Recalling what was said earlier about early modern understandings of mental composition, it is vital to note that English subjects routinely commented on perceived psychological norms in population groups that differed in race and ethnicity. Those working in modern critical disability studies are well aware that the racial dynamics of neurodivergence must be explicitly acknowledged and considered; for one thing, neurodivergent disabilities like autism are famously underdiagnosed in people of color, and scholars are thus increasingly exploring how race and neurodivergence intersect, in both lived and literary experience.⁶³ Renaissance thinkers had much to say about how place of origin affected a people's psychology; in the preface to The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601), for example, Thomas Wright argues that "those which inhabit … Northerne Climates" have "a natural inclination to vertue and honestie," while "them of hotter Countries" are more disposed "vnto craftinesse and warinesse."⁶⁴ But not surprisingly, this so-called geohumoral outlook took a supposed English temperament as the established standard, and saw other cultures in terms of deviation and variance from this baseline—meaning that the non-English mind was regularly seen in terms of divergence from the English norm.⁶⁵

Take the association of Moors with jealousy, familiar to early modern scholars from conversations about Othello. "Southerne men," it was said, "are more hot lascivious & iealous then such as liue in the north," and this certainly applied to the English understanding of the Moorish people's makeup; contemporary reports advised that "the Moors are by Nature plagued with Jealousy, cloistring their Wives up, and sequestring them," that "the Moors, being the most jealous of all people, take a strict care to conceal their Wives and Slaves from the worlds eye," and that "The Moors are … jealous and revengeful; implacable in their hatred, and impatient till they have avenged an Injury."⁶⁶ In the sense that English people understood themselves to be relatively free from jealousy—those of "Brittaine," Robert Burton reflects, "are not so much troubled with this ferall malady"—Moors were thus fashioned as psychologically and behaviorally divergent from the norm—or neurodivergent, as we might put it.⁶⁷ In terms of Othello, it follows, Desdemona's dismissal of expected geohumoral logic—she denies that her husband is jealous, affirming that "I think the sun where he was born / Drew all such humours from him"—indicates her refusal to see him as a neurological Other, a crucial insight into her assessment of Othello's mind as constituting a nobly normative true self that contrasts with his physically visible "visage."⁶⁸ Of course, Othello's epileptic condition marks him as neurologically atypical in another way, and this too intersects with matters of race, in the sense that his seizure famously sends him into a "savage madness" that recalls the racial associations of beastliness earlier in the play; Justin Shaw, in fact, has recently explored the connection between race and disability in Othello.⁶⁹ Thus early modern neurodiversity studies will have much to gain by engaging the vital subfield of Premodern Critical Race Studies.

As discussed earlier, neurodivergence is often taken as primarily referring to developmental differences. Recent work in early modern race studies has also attended to the ways in which perfectibility became a property of those who were supposedly racially superior. Patricia Akhimie, for example, shows that an incapacity for improvement of conduct and the overall self came to be viewed as linked to somatic differences like skin color.⁷⁰ Through Kimberly Anne Coles's work on religious essentialism, we can see that deviation from the "right" trajectory also came to be understood as defining the spiritual development (or lack thereof) of people with dark skin.⁷¹ According to Goodey, notions of spiritual development that emerged in theories of election and predestination following the Protestant Reformation in fact gave rise to more secular teleologies of the individual and the view that "[t]o develop is to be normal, to be normal is to develop."⁷² Furthermore, lack of development was routinely attributed by Europeans to both the cultures and individuals belonging to Indigenous societies in the Americas.⁷³ Accordingly, the racial components of early modern neuronormativity, such as it was, equally invite us to newly consider aspects of colonialism and empire, as developmental capacity was a vital way that people across the world were racialized in the period.

Finally, it is also necessary to recognize that neurodivergence intersects with matters of class in the early modern period. Goodey, for example, speaks of both "degenerate gentry" and "the lay idiots of the commons"—people who, by virtue of their class position, "do not know their own natural and social essence."⁷⁴ More specifically, Bridget M. Bartlett draws attention to the classed dimension of idiocy in Macbeth, and even how this association features in the play's long afterlife (remember the mention above of Benjy Compson).⁷⁵ It is hard to ignore the fact that many of the era's characters with atypical verbal expression and behavior are distinctly positioned as class outsiders from their peers—think, for instance, of the malapropic speech of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing or the Gravedigger or "Clown" in Hamlet misinterpreting simple questions.⁷⁶ Not so different from "idiot," "clown" referred to an unsophisticated country bumpkin before it referred to a discrete comic character per se.

One good example of how poor language abilities and mental disability converge in class comedy is the speech of Tim Yellowhammer in Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (c. 1613)—a play that, like so many other city comedies, pokes fun at airs and ambitions of the middling sorts who were gaining economic power in early modern London. Prosperous though unrefined, the goldsmith Master Yellowhammer and his wife Maudline had nonetheless recognized that their son Tim "was an idiot indeed" before they sent him to university—a phrase that recalls the way that early moderns not only spoke about unwise or unintelligent persons, but also how they designated individuals who are literally disabled.⁷⁷ Additionally, Tim's tutor—who bears a resemblance to the companion characters who attend on clear natural fools like Bartholomew Cokes in Bartholomew Fair (1614) and Poggio in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (c. 1629)—repeatedly utters double entendres about the pupil's academic achievement that identify him with mental disability: the Tutor did not merely introduce Tim to scholastic texts, but specifically "read the Dunces to him" and now they "they flow naturally from him."⁷⁸ Furthermore, while Tim repeatedly proves to be an "idiot" in the increasingly common sense of "unintelligent person," he eventually returns from school speaking outlandishly bad Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—and his parents, unlearned and therefore unable to interpret classical languages, are generally proud and impressed by his gibberish, which they fancy they can understand. Middleton thus mocks the irremediable idiocy of the economically ascendant but unsophisticated middle classes as much as he mocks Tim's actual disability.

Like gender, sexuality, and race, class is thus another central component of early modern subjectivity that may be explored via the lens of neurodiversity and neurodivergence—as should be clear, atypical neurological functioning vitally intersects the markers of social identity that already elicit scholarly attention. Marks and Irish, in fact, actually posit that we might even think of early modern characters (or anyone, real or fictional), in terms of their neurological identity—that is to say, how an individual tends to experience things like cognition, emotion, and sensation may contribute to their overall subjective way of being in the world as other more familiar markers of social identity.⁷⁹

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But of course, beyond literary and cultural representations of neurological atypicality, scholars working on topics related to neurodiversity also consider historical individuals who may actually be thought of in terms of neurodivergence. This obviously applies to modern figures who explicitly identify as neurodivergent—as in the analysis of life-writing by autistic authors—but researchers have also tentatively explored the possible neurodivergence of historical writers like William Wordsworth, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Anderson, and George Bernard Shaw.⁸⁰ We have seen how early modern scholars have already considered historical fools in terms of neurodivergence, and it's easy to imagine how this work might be extended more broadly across the period. On a most basic level, it is tempting to think of literary luminaries in terms of cognitive uniqueness; most people, it seems, would probably not think that Edmund Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Mary Wroth, or John Milton (to name just a few) possessed a "typical" mind. Indeed, traits of so-called "giftedness" and "genius" often co-occur with other forms of neurodivergence, and exceptional cognitive ability itself is a kind of atypicality; more specifically, Folkerth has traced the complex history of ingenium ("wit") in his analysis of neurodivergence in early modern fools.⁸¹ But beyond such aesthetic assessments, it is also possible to tentatively consider other early modern historical subjects in terms of potential neurodivergence—provided, of course, that we remain flexible, and avoid rigid diagnosis.

Experts have suggested, for example, that James I—famously known as "the wisest fool in Christendom"—exhibited certain "Asperger traits which may explain some of the King's unusual behavioural and psycho-social features"; furthermore, his tendency to stutter and speculative diagnosis of "mild cerebral palsy" would equally characterize him as neurodivergent.⁸² Speaking of monarchs, another intriguing possibility is the case of King Henry VIII—a monarch who famously ended his long reign as a disabled person. Though Henry was healthy as a young man, his condition changed in the second half of his life, as he became afflicted with a number of ailments—ailments that have prompted enormous speculation, with scholars variously suggesting (as one popular account puts it) that "Henry suffered from Type II diabetes, syphilis, an endocrine problem called Cushing's syndrome, or myxedema, which is a byproduct of hypothyroidism."⁸³ But beyond such physical disability, however, was a condition that has become even more infamous in the lore surrounding Henry VIII: his apparent "significant personality shift in middle age towards more paranoia, anxiety, depression and mental deterioration."⁸⁴ It is certainly true that Henry seemed to become more personally unsteady in the second half of his life; to name just one example, the executions of Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard, Thomas Cromwell, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey have been enough to cement his reputation as an unabashed "tyrant," an allegedly "psychotic monster, suspicious of everyone around him, including those most dear to him."⁸⁵ Though various explanations for this shift have been offered, the most intriguing (and compelling) is the suggestion that King Henry suffered traumatic brain injury, as the cumulative result of sports injury. In 1524 and 1525, Henry seems to have experienced head trauma while jousting and vaulting, but the most drastic event occurred in 1536—a year that has been more broadly identified as a watershed for Henry—when the king had another jousting accident, where he "fell so heavily that every one thought it a miracle he was not killed."⁸⁶ Things looked quite grim: he was, according to observers, actually "thought to be dead for two hours," so he clearly spent significant time unconscious. The shock, in fact, was so intense that it caused Anne Boleyn to miscarry a son—a tragedy that only complicated Henry's recovery.⁸⁷

In 2016, a group of neurologists reassessed the historical record in light of modern scientific developments, and noted the symptoms that Henry displayed in the second half of his life: including memory problems, impulse control, sociopathy, headaches, insomnia, and depression.⁸⁸ While acknowledging that a diagnosis is not provable, they nonetheless conclude that because Henry "appears to have subjected his head to a lifetime of repeated trauma," it is "entirely plausible … that repeated traumatic brain injury lead to changes in Henry's personality."⁸⁹ This means, in other words, that there is a valid evidential basis for considering King Henry VIII to be neurodivergent in the second half of his life. Scholars often focus on neurodivergence that is present from birth, but there is also an increasing awareness that acquired cognitive changes across the lifespan must have a place in the study of neurodiversity more broadly; traumatic brain injury can certainly lead to atypical cognitive and behavioral functioning, so it must be considered alongside more regularly discussed forms of neurodivergence.⁹⁰ In this case, considering Henry VIII as neurodivergent does not excuse his brutal conduct in the last two decades of his life—but it certainly recontextualizes his interpersonal behavior during this period, and complicates any simple assessment of his infamous "tyranny." More specifically, there is opportunity to reconsider the historical and literary record of his later life with a sensitivity to neurodiversity; one might, for example, explore differences in his pre-1536 and post-1536 extant correspondence, to see if cognitive change can be detected at the level of expression and style. The example of Henry, of course, also raises intriguing questions about the many people in the period who participated in violent sports like jousting; on this note, Lianne Habinek has argued that head trauma is a central context for the understanding of Hamlet.⁹¹

These examples of King James and Henry, to be sure, involve some degree of diagnostic impulse—especially because physicians and diagnosticians have been involved in the work. But, as we have mentioned, neurodiversity studies is in general often wary of diagnostic labels, given that the medical framework that they emerge from often tends to pathologize and marginalize forms of neurological difference. Fortunately, there are also less diagnostic ways of considering the neurodivergence of historical figures, and this is indeed the approach that Seymour takes in her analysis of Huge Blair of Borgue, an eccentric eighteenth-century nobleman.⁹² Blair was legally deemed an "idiot" during his life, and has been tentatively diagnosed as autistic by some modern historians—but Seymour, reevaluating Blair "from the standpoint of neurodiversity pride," shows how we can appreciate his atypical way of being in the world without resorting to "modern diagnostic criteria [that] can replicate some of the harsh judgments that the court made against him" during his own life.⁹³ Because Blair "seems to have thought and behaved differently to his society's norm," we can still celebrate his neurodivergence "without needing to consult lists of diagnostic criteria," and thus engage his neurological difference "beyond diagnostic frameworks" that are importantly criticized by modern scholars of neurodiversity.⁹⁴ As Seymour notes, "neurodivergent people's scholarship, creativity, and experiential knowledge offer a rich[er] understanding of what it means to be autistic" than can ever been gleaned from medical diagnosis alone, and she shows how certain aspects of Blair's being (such as his habits of copying and imitation) can help us appreciate his neurodivergence in a fuller and more inclusive way. The very premise that neurocognitive diversity existed prior to and outside of modern taxonomies of difference allows us to bypass the limits of retrospective diagnosis, and think more expansively about neurodivergent possibilities in the historical record.⁹⁵

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Finally, we must conclude our agenda for early modern neurodivergence studies by acknowledging that there is much to learn about Renaissance neurodiversity—and Renaissance literature and culture more generally—by valuing the experience of neurodivergent readers, scholars, and theatre practitioners. Researchers are beginning to recognize that the unique qualities of neurodivergent minds can offer novel insights and perspectives on the interpretive and analytical challenges of literary and cultural studies—a recent book chapter, for example, reveals "What Some Autistics Can Teach Us About Poetry"—and it's important to especially consider the neurodivergent perspective when considering forms of cognitive and social atypicality in earlier historical periods.⁹⁶ Seymour, for example, concludes her "autistic reading" of King John's Bastard with an eye to the character's potential performance by a disabled actor; furthermore, her book Shakespeare and Neurodiversity is about teaching Shakespeare in a neurologically-inclusive way.⁹⁷ On a similar note, Robert Shaughnessy has published a series of articles on "neurodiverse engagements with Shakespeare and Performance," documenting the various ways that autistic practitioners interact with Shakespeare's plays.⁹⁸ Indeed, Loftis details how Shakespeare continues to be used as a tool of neuronormative ableism—in the sense that "some Shakespeare therapy programs are based on popular beliefs that Shakespeare's plays somehow encapsulate what it means to be human," and in the sense that "many Shakespeare therapy programmes are invested in the idea that Shakespeare is 'universal'"—but she also demonstrates how making Shakespearean performance accessible to neurodiverse audiences and practitioners can generate valuable new perspectives, as in Shakespeare-based therapeutic programs, like the Hunter Heartbeat Method of therapy for autistic children.⁹⁹ Furthermore, from a historical perspective, Philippian demonstrates how the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer "functioned as a mechanism for wider social access" for readers that "exhibit atypical Theory of Mind development."¹⁰⁰ (The accuracy and utility of the Theory of Mind deficit model of autism have been disputed, but it has sometimes proved to be a useful entry point into explorations of reading and cognition across different subfields of literary studies.¹⁰¹) Finally, in 2016 Gillian Silverman published an article on how neurodivergent readers might invite us to freshly see the fields of textual studies and book history; the insights of this research, of course, should impact how we understand the material experience of Renaissance texts and documents.¹⁰² As more scholars turn to the study of historical neurodivergence, it will be particularly important to give space to the neurodivergent encounter with early modern literature and culture—readers, scholars, and practitioners who are themselves neurodivergent will be able to offer a particularly unique set of insights into both literary works and the forms of atypicality preserved in the archival record. We know that more neurodivergent students (professionally diagnosed or self-identified) are attending college than ever before, and more faculty are also becoming open about their neurodiversity or discovering their own neurodivergent identities; accordingly, listening to the neurodivergent perspective on the early modern world will offer new opportunities for the field of English Renaissance studies more broadly.¹⁰³

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The preceding essay has presented just some of the many possible ways that scholars of early modern literature and culture might consider the topics of neurodiversity and neurodivergence. We have focused on our own research area of 16th and 17th century England, but hope it is instantly apparent how the general methods we propose could be resituated within any early modern language tradition. Our goal, of course, has been to help create an agenda for the future of early modern neurodiversity studies—but we equally believe that the general principles and methods suggested above could also inform the analysis of historical neurodivergence in any period. Indeed, neurodiversity has become something of a buzzword in academia recently, and we maintain that early modern literature and culture can (and must) be a part of the lively interdisciplinary conversations emerging around this topic. We also believe that by engaging seriously with neurodivergence and the neurodiversity paradigm from the outset, our discipline can avoid using neurodiversity as merely a buzzword.¹⁰⁴ Scholars and activists have criticized "neurodiversity-lite" attitudes that use "the rhetoric of the neurodiversity movement without fully understanding the assumptions that are the foundation of the neurodiversity paradigm," and thus may only tolerate "a certain 'kind' of autistic person."¹⁰⁵ By consciously adopting a liberally inclusive approach to historical and contemporary neurodiversity and neurodivergence, scholars of the English Renaissance can be best equipped to consider a largely unexamined quality of early modern life, reflecting the fact that there have always been neurodivergent people. What's more, in the largest sense, Irish has argued that thinking about neurodiversity in the broadest possible manner allows us to see that all analysis of early modern cognition, emotion, and sensation contributes to our larger understanding of human neurological diversity, whether it explicitly centers neurodivergence or not—so the possibilities for the research area are enormous. It is our final hope that the terrain we have roughly sketched in this essay will start to become more thoroughly explored by subsequent scholars—though early modern neurodiversity studies is a field very much in its infancy, it has the potential to seismically re-shift how we think about those who inhabited the early modern world.