David M. Turner is Senior Lecturer in History at Swansea University. He formerly taught at the University of Glamorgan where he was director of the ‘Controlling Bodies: the Regulation of Conduct 1650–2000’ project. He has published widely on the social and cultural history of early modern Britain, including the monograph Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England 1660–1740 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). His current research focuses on the idea of the ‘body beautiful’ in the eighteenth century and connections between disability and criminality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kevin Stagg lectures in History at Cardiff University and recently contributed a Chapter on the body for Garthine Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (Hodder Arnold, 2005). His research interests range from the body and disability in history to early modern print culture, transport and trade.

• Preface, David M. Turner; Chapter 1 Introduction, David M. Turner; Part 1 Disability and deformity, Sharon Snyder, David Mitchell; Chapter 2 Representing physical difference, Kevin Stagg; Chapter 3 ‘When a disease it selfe doth Cromwel it’, David E. Shuttleton; Chapter 4 Plague spots, Hal Gladfelder; Chapter 5 ‘Wonderful Effects!!!’, Suzanne Nunn; Part 2 Controlling disabled bodies, Sharon Snyder, David Mitchell; Chapter 6 Disciplining disabled bodies, Anne Borsay; Chapter 7 Making deaf children talk, François Buton; Chapter 8 Eugenics, modernity and nationalism, Ayça Alemdaro?lu; Chapter 9 ‘Human dregs at the bottom of our national vats’, Sharon Morris; Chapter 10 ‘That bastard’s following me!’, Kristy Muir; Chapter 11 Afterword – regulated bodies, Sharon Snyder, David Mitchell;