Intellectual disability

This collection of essays investigates the historical genealogy of our contemporary ideas of intellectual or learning disability. The essays engage with literary, educational, cultural, legal, religious, psychiatric and philosophical histories to track how and why these precursor ideas arose and explore how they helped shape current concepts.

1 Introduction: the emergent critical history of intellectual disability - Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton

2 Conceptualization of intellectual disability in medieval English law - Wendy J. Turner

3 'Will-nots' and 'Cannots': tracing a trope in medieval thought - Irina Metzler

4 'Some have it from birth, some by disposition': foolishness in medieval German literature - Janina Dillig

5 Exclusion from the eucharist: the seventeenth-century church and the creation of 'intellectually' disabled people - C. F. Goodey

6 'A defect in the mind': cognitive ableism in Swift's Gulliver's Travels - D. Christopher Gabbard

7 The age of sensationalism and the construction of intellectual disability - Tim Stainton

8 Peter the 'wild boy': what Peter means to us - Katie Branch, Clemma Fleat, Nicola Grove, Tim Lumley Smith, and Robin Meader

9 'Belief', 'opinion', and 'knowledge': the idiot in law in the the long eighteenth century - Simon Jarrett

10 Idiocy and the conceptual economy of madness - Murray K. Simpson

11 Visiting Earlswood: the asylum travelogue and the shaping of 'idiocy' - Patrick McDonagh

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Index