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

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.

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.