On this page you will find links to resources related to Early Modern History from roughly 1500-1750CE.
Dwarfism
Learning Difficulties
Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England
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This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer - as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body - remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.
Defects
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"Defects" brings together essays on the emergence of the concept of monstrosity in the eighteenth century and the ways it paralleled the emergence of notions of sexual difference. Women, declared a mid-eighteenth-century vindication, have been regarded since Aristotle as deformed amphibious things, "neither more or less than Monsters" (Beauty's Triumph 1758). This alliance of monstrosity with misogyny, along with the definition of sexual difference as aberration, is the starting point for this volume's investigation of monstrosity's cultural work in the eighteenth century and its simultaneous mapping and troubling of the range of differences. This collection investigates the conceptual and geographical mapping of early modern and Enlightenment ideas of monstrosity onto a range of differences that contested established categories. The essays consider the representations and material dimensions of phenomena as diverse as femininity and disfigurement, the material imagination and monstrous birth, ugliness as an aesthetic category, deafness and theories of sign language, and the exotic, racialized deformed. Collectively, they demonstrate that the emergence of sexual difference is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of a category of the human that is imagined and deformed, monstrous, and ugly. Contributors include Barbara Benedict, Jill Campbell, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Lennard Davis, Helen Deutsch, Robert Jones, Cora Kaplan, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Felicity Nussbaum, Stephen Pender, and Joel Reed. Helen Deutsch is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture. Felicity Nussbaum is Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative.
Disability and the Tudors
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Throughout history, how a society treated its disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their history have been overlooked. Very little on the infirm and mentally ill was written down during the renaissance period. The Tudor period is no exception, and presents a complex story and unparalleled. The sixteenth century was far from exemplary in the treatment of its infirm, but a multifaceted and ambiguous story emerges, where society's 'natural fools' were elevated as much as they were belittled. Meet characters like Will Somer, Henry VIII's fool at court, whom the king depended upon, and learn of how the dissolution of the monasteries contributed to forming an army of 'sturdy beggars' who roamed Tudor England without charitable support. From the nobility to the lowest of society, Phillipa Connolly casts a light on the lives of disabled people in Tudor England and guides us through the social, religious, cultural and ruling classes' response to disability as it was then perceived.
Disability in Eighteenth-Century England
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This is the first book-length study of physical disability in eighteenth-century England. It assesses the ways in which meanings of physical difference were formed within different cultural contexts, and examines how disabled men and women used, appropriated, or rejected these representations in making sense of their own experiences. In the process, it asks a series of related questions: what constituted 'disability' in eighteenth-century culture and society? How was impairment perceived? How did people with disabilities see themselves and relate to others? What do their stories tell us about the social and cultural contexts of disability, and in what ways were these narratives and experiences shaped by class and gender? In order to answer these questions, the book explores the languages of disability, the relationship between religious and medical discourses of disability, and analyzes depictions of people with disabilities in popular culture, art, and the media. It also uncovers the 'hidden histories' of disabled men and women themselves drawing on elite letters and autobiographies, Poor Law documents and criminal court records. The book won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Prize in 2012 for the best book published worldwide in disability history and also inspired parts of the Radio 4 series, 'Disability: A New History', on which the author was historical adviser. The series gained 2.6 million listeners when it first aired in 2013.
Disability in the Arab Ottoman World, 1500-1800
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Physical, sensory, and mental impairments can influence an individual's status in society as much as the more familiar categories of gender, class, religion, race, and ethnicity. This was especially true of the early modern Arab Ottoman world, where being judged able or disabled impacted every aspect of a person's life, including performance of religious ritual, marriage, job opportunities, and the ability to buy and sell property. Sara Scalenghe's book is the first on the history of both physical and mental disabilities in the Middle East and North Africa, and the first to examine disability in the non-Western world before the nineteenth century. Unlike previous scholarly works that examine disability as discussed in religious texts such as the Qur'an and the Hadith, this study focuses on representations and classifications of disability and impairment across a wide range of biographical, legal, medical, and divinatory primary sources.
Institutions of Confinement
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A study of the development of prisons, hospitals and insane asylums in America and Europe that grew out of discussions between its two editors about their work on the history of hospitals, poor relief, deviance, and crime, and a subsequent conference that attempted to assess the impacts of Foucault and Elias. Seventeen contributors from six different countries with backgrounds in history, sociology and criminology utilize various methodological approaches and reflect the various viewpoints in the theoretical debate over Foucault's work.
Mad Tuscans and Their Families
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Based on three hundred civil and criminal cases over four centuries, Elizabeth W. Mellyn reconstructs the myriad ways families, communities, and civic and medical authorities met in the dynamic arena of Tuscan law courts to forge pragmatic solutions to the problems that madness brought to their households and streets. In some of these cases, solutions were protective and palliative; in others, they were predatory or abusive. The goals of families were sometimes at odds with those of the courts, but for the most part families and judges worked together to order households and communities in ways that served public and private interests. For most of the period Mellyn examines, Tuscan communities had no institutions devoted solely to the treatment and protection of the mentally disturbed; responsibility for their long-term care fell to the family. By the end of the seventeenth century, Tuscans, like other Europeans, had come to explain madness in medical terms and the mentally disordered were beginning to move from households to hospitals. In Mad Tuscans and Their Families, Mellyn argues against the commonly held belief that these changes chart the rise of mechanisms of social control by emerging absolutist states. Rather, the story of mental illness is one of false starts, expedients, compromise, and consensus created by a wide range of historical actors.
Recovering Disability in Early Modern England
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While early modern selfhood has been explored during the last two decades via a series of historical identity studies involving class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality, until very recently there has been little engagement with disability and disabled selves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This omission is especially problematic insofar as representations of disabled bodies and minds serve as some of the signature features in English Renaissance texts. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England explores how recent conversations about difference in the period have either overlooked or misidentified disability representations. It also presents early modern disability studies as a new theoretical lens that can reanimate scholarly dialogue about human variation and early modern subjectivities even as it motivates more politically invested classroom pedagogies. The ten essays in this collection range across genre, scope, and time, including examinations of real-life court dwarfs and dwarf narrators in Edmund Spenser's poetry; disability in Aphra Behn's assessment of gender and femininity; disability humor, Renaissance jest books, and cultural ideas about difference; madness in revenge tragedies; Spenserian allegory and impairment; the materiality of literary blindness; feigned disability in Jonsonian drama; political appropriation of Richard III in the postcommunist Czech Republic; the Book of Common Prayeras textual accommodation for cognitive disability; and Thomas Hobbes's and John Locke's inherently ableist conceptions of freedom and political citizenship.
