Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability

Description

Elucidates how Renaissance writers used monstrosity to imagine what we now call disability Monstrous Kinds is the first book to explore textual representations of disability in the global Renaissance. Elizabeth B. Bearden contends that monstrosity, as a precursor to modern concepts of disability, has much to teach about our tendency to inscribe disability with meaning. Understanding how early modern writers approached disability not only provides more accurate genealogies of disability, but also helps nuance current aesthetic and theoretical disability formulations. The book analyzes the cultural valences of early modern disability across a broad national and chronological span, attending to the specific bodily, spatial, and aesthetic systems that contributed to early modern literary representations of disability. The cross section of texts (including conduct books and treatises, travel writing and wonder books) is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary exchange. Bearden questions grand narratives that convey a progression of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen, suggesting that, instead, these categories coexist and intersect. Contents......Page 10 List of Figures......Page 12 A Note on Translations, Editions, Transcriptions, and Abbreviations......Page 14 Introduction......Page 16 1. The Ideal Monster: Disability, Courtliness, and Civilizing Body Talk......Page 48 2. Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in England and Beyond......Page 94 3. Moctezuma’s Zoo or Cortés’s Courtiers: Geographies of Disability in Mexica and European Courts......Page 124 4. “Signing in the Seraglio”: Global Disability in European Travel Accounts of the Ottoman Court......Page 156 5. “Unnaturall Order”: Conjoined Twins and Monstrous Narration in the Wonder Book......Page 194 Coda......Page 244 Works Cited......Page 250 Index of Names......Page 272 General Index......Page 276