Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Richard H. Godden is Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University, USA, where he works on the representations of disability in medieval literature and culture.Asa Simon Mittman is Professor of Art and Art History at California State University, Chico, USA, and author of several books and articles on monsters and marginality.

• Section I: Introduction.- 1. Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman.- Section II: Discourses of Bodily Difference.- 2. From Monstrosity to Postnormality: Montaigne, Canguilhem, Foucault.- 3. “If in Other Respects He Appears to be Effectively Human”: Defining Monstrosity in Medieval English Law.- 4. (Dis)functional Faces: Signs of the Monstrous?.- 5. Grendel and Goliath: Monstrous Superability and Disability in the Old English Corpus.- 6. E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power.- Section III: Dis/Identifying the Other.- 7. "Blob Child" Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars.- 8. Attending to “Beasts Irrational” in Gower’s Visio Anglie.- 9. How a Monster Means: The Significance of Bodily Difference in the Christopher Cynocephalus Tradition.- 10. Lycanthropy andLunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi.- 11. Eschatology for Cannibals: A System of Aberrance in the Old English Andreas.- 12. The Monstrous Womb of Early Modern Midwifery Manuals.- Section IV: Queer Couplings.- 13. Blindness and Posthuman Sexuality in Paradise Lost.- 14. Dwelling Underground in The Book of John Mandeville: Monstrosity, Disability, Ecology.- Section V: Coda.- 15. Muteness and Disembodied Difference: Three Case Studies.