Intellectual Disability

Patrick McDonagh is a faculty member in the Department of English at Concordia University, Montreal and co-founder of the Spectrum Society for Community Living in VancouverC. F. Goodey is Honorary Fellow in the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of LeicesterTim Stainton is Professor in the School of Social Work and Director of the Centre for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver

• 1 Introduction: the emergent critical history of intellectual disability – Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton2 Conceptualization of intellectual disability in medieval English law – Wendy J. Turner3 ‘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 Dillig5 Exclusion from the eucharist: the seventeenth-century church and the creation of ‘intellectually’ disabled people – C. F. Goodey6 ‘A defect in the mind’: cognitive ableism in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – D. Christopher Gabbard7 The age of sensationalism and the construction of intellectual disability – Tim Stainton8 Peter the ‘wild boy’: what Peter means to us – Katie Branch, Clemma Fleat, Nicola Grove, Tim Lumley Smith, and Robin Meader9 ‘Belief’, ‘opinion’, and ‘knowledge’: the idiot in law in the the long eighteenth century – Simon Jarrett10 Idiocy and the conceptual economy of madness – Murray K. Simpson11 Visiting Earlswood: the asylum travelogue and the shaping of ‘idiocy’ – Patrick McDonaghSelect bibliographyIndex

‘Intellectual Disability is an original and compelling work that traces the concept of “idiocy” or “intellectual disability” across an ambitious time frame while still retaining cohesiveness and strength of argument. The volume makes clear the complexity and fluidity of concepts of intellectual disability in a series of accessible and informative chapters. The book will appeal not only to historians of psychiatry and medicine but also to those with an interest in far broader areas, such as the history of religion, law, and other associated areas.’Ian Miller, University of Ulster, H-Disability January 2019