Disability in English Renaissance Literature

FAIN: FT-248806-16

Allison Hobgood
Willamette University (Salem, OR 97301-3922)

Completion of a book-length study of disability in English Renaissance literature.

My project excavates an archive of literary and other cultural texts to explore disability in Renaissance England. I argue that the drive to establish forms of physical and mental difference was a key shaping force in this period, and I give readers tools for grappling with mental and physical variation before the advent of "norms" as we know them. I read English Renaissance poetry and drama to uncover “early modern ideologies of ability”: to illuminate the “commonsense,” pervasive privileging of ablebodiedness in early modernity that energized a range of approaches to science, art, religion, and politics. I demonstrate how linguistic, spiritual, and intellectual capacities often aligned with Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation were in fact reliant upon powerful fictions of ability. I reveal not only the diverse logics of ability operating in early modernity but illustrate the surprising ways these ableist norms were generative material for Renaissance writers.

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