New book: Intellectual disability: A conceptual history, 1200–1900
Edited by Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey and Timothy Stainton
This collection explores the historical origins of our modern concepts
of intellectual or learning disability. The essays, from some of the
leading historians of ideas of intellectual disability, focus on British
and European material from the Middle Ages to the late-nineteenth
century and extend across legal, educational, literary, religious,
philosophical and psychiatric histories. They investigate how precursor
concepts and discourses were shaped by and interacted with their
particular social, cultural and intellectual environments, eventually
giving rise to contemporary ideas. The collection is essential reading
for scholars interested in the history of intelligence, intellectual
disability and related concepts, as well as in disability history
generally.
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
Select bibliography
Index