Early Modern Neurodivergence

Early Modern Neurodivergence is about how what we now call neurodivergence and neurodiversity were understood, described, and lived in early modern Europe. Centring neurodivergent people's experiences throughout—both those in the early modern era and the present day—this book provides neurodivergent readings of literary and legal texts from Britain, Spain, and Poland, in connection with other cultures, countries, and languages. Early Modern Neurodivergence uplifts neurodivergent ways of reading and engaging with literature, from stimming with texts to relying on the neurodivergent experiences in our own lives to understand what these texts might mean. Drawing on archival materials, theoretical work in neurodiversity studies, and qualitative research with neurodivergent people, this book offers a framework for defining and working with early modern neurodivergence. The volume deals with the figure of Echo in British and Latin literature, the question of neurodivergent representation in Lope's La Dama Boba, Cervantes's Don Quijote as a stimmy text, the sonnet sequence (and particularly works by Jan Kochanowski and Anne Lok) as a neurodivergent literary form, and the ways in which neurodivergent knowledges and experiences can illuminate legal documents relating to the laird Hugh Blair of Borgue. The Coda offers a challenge to the idea that early modern neurodiversity studies is a new or just-developing field, and looks forward to a diverse array of new works in the field in the future. An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.