Alice Equestri is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Padua, Italy and former Marie Sklodowska-Curie researcher at the University of Sussex. She has published two monographs: Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law, and Medicine 1500-1640 (2021; winner of the AIA Junior Book Prize 2023) and The Fools of Shakespeare's Romances (2016). Her essays have appeared in venues including Studies in Philology, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, Renaissance Studies, Notes and Queries, Disability Studies Quarterly and Cahiers Élisabéthains. Her research interests include folly and intellectual disability in Early Modern English Literature, Shakespeare, Robert Armin, English translations or adaptations of Italian novellas, and law and literature.

• List of figuresAcknowledgmentsNotes on contributorsIntroduction: meanings, relations and ecologies of intellectual disabilityAlice EquestriPART I. COURT AND POWER1. Humour and disability: French sixteenth-century literary portrayals of the jester TribouletMargaret Harp2. 'Let antimasques not be long; they have been commonly of fools': intellectual disability and neurodiversity in Ben Jonson’s masquesOlivia Henderson3. Invested in motley: intellectual disability and the fool's licence in ShakespeareWes FolkerthPART II. COMMUNITY, POLITICS AND SOCIETY4. What was so funny about Jack Adams? The intellectually disabled individual as a public figure of mirth in early modern LondonPeter K. Andersson5.“VVhether the mind wants eyes, or eyes want minde”. Parasitic twins and intellectual disability in early modern Europe: the case of Lazzaro and Giovanni Battista ColloredoLuca Baratta6. Conceiving brainlessness: The anencephalous child, the human person, and the headless mobArnaud Zimmern7. 'The forld’s fond idiot': Robert Armin, Blue John and the performance of idiocyPatrick McDonaghPART III. SOUL AND AFTERWORLD8. Gil Vicente: Auto da Barca do Inferno and the representation of the 'fool' in early modern Portuguese dramaRicardo Rato Rodrigues9. Developmental disability as material, metaphor and essential difference in an Elizabethan morality playBridget Bartlett10. 'This Silly Deluded Woman': rhapsodic experiences and intellectual disability in Humphrey Ellis’s Pseudochristus (1650)Laura SeymourPART IV. GLOBAL ENCOUNTERS11. Race and negotiations of intellectual inferiority in early modern travel writing and ethnography, 1550-1660Alice Equestri12. Whiteness as knowingness: race and intellectual disability in Shakespeare’s OthelloPenelope Geng and Andrew BozioAfterword: the intellect, its disabilities and their historical productionChristopher GoodeyIndex

This is an excellent book, written responsibly and with care, that makes a compelling case for bringing experiences of disability from the past into conversation with experiences in the present. I learned much from reading it.