Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England

Traces the influence of early modern theology, particularly Protestant theology, on cultural understandings of and reactions to sensory disability in the period.

Chronicling England’s infamous rejection of an established faith tradition – the Protestant Reformation – and its reverberating effects on societal interpretations of sensory disability, Mary Lutze offers a new epistemology for understanding early modern perspectives of the disabled. In addition to illuminating the historical treatment of disabled bodies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Lutze’s study clarifies an origin for the inherited stigma towards nonnormative bodies today. In its introduction of the early modern religious model of disabilities and the application of that model on a catalogue of early modern cultural artifacts, Reforming Sensory Disability in Early Modern England provides a new dialectic by which disability studies and early modern scholars may approach and understand the dramatic and nondramatic texts of the period.