This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.
Author(s): Richard H. Godden, Asa Simon Mittman
Series: The New Middle Ages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 352
City: Cham
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxvii
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman (Richard H. Godden, Asa Simon Mittman)....Pages 3-31
Front Matter ....Pages 33-33
From Monstrosity to Postnormality: Montaigne, Canguilhem, Foucault (Kathleen Perry Long)....Pages 35-61
“If in Other Respects He Appears to Be Effectively Human”: Defining Monstrosity in Medieval English Law (Eliza Buhrer)....Pages 63-83
(Dis)functional Faces: Signs of the Monstrous? (Emily Cock, Patricia Skinner)....Pages 85-105
Grendel and Goliath: Monstrous Superability and Disability in the Old English Corpus (Karen Bruce Wallace)....Pages 107-126
E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power (Shyama Rajendran)....Pages 127-143
Front Matter ....Pages 145-145
“Blob Child” Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars (Molly Lewis)....Pages 147-162
Attending to “Beasts Irrational” in Gower’s Visio Anglie (Haylie Swenson)....Pages 163-180
How a Monster Means: The Significance of Bodily Difference in the Christopher Cynocephalus Tradition (Spencer J. Weinreich)....Pages 181-207
Lycanthropy and Lunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi (Sonya Freeman Loftis)....Pages 209-225
Eschatology for Cannibals: A System of Aberrance in the Old English Andreas (Leah Pope Parker)....Pages 227-248
The Monstrous Womb of Early Modern Midwifery Manuals (Melissa Hull Geil)....Pages 249-266
Front Matter ....Pages 267-267
Blindness and Posthuman Sexuality in Paradise Lost (John S. Garrison)....Pages 269-284
Dwelling Underground in The Book of John Mandeville: Monstrosity, Disability, Ecology (Alan S. Montroso)....Pages 285-302
Front Matter ....Pages 303-303
Muteness and Disembodied Difference: Three Case Studies (Karl Steel)....Pages 305-314
Back Matter ....Pages 315-352
