Collecting together essays written by an international set of contributors, this book provides an important contribution to the emerging field of disability history. It explores changes in understandings of deformity and disability between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and reveal the ways in which different societies have conceptualised the normal and the pathological.

Through a variety of case studies including: early modern birth defects, homosexuality, smallpox scarring, vaccination, orthopaedics, deaf education, eugenics, mental deficiency, and the experiences of...

A major survey of representations of adultery in later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England brings together a wide variety of literary and legal sources, it charts and explains shifts in the understanding of marital infidelity. It examines, in particular, challenges to religious perceptions of sexual sin and the development of a more rational understanding of the causes and consequences of adultery.

Disability is a burgeoning area of historical research. Historians of disability -- largely looking back at the period from a modern perspective -- have identified the eighteenth century as a key period of transition. In materialist histories of disability, the stirrings of industrialisation and economic change in this period is taken to herald the emergence of new modes of economic rationality that served to marginalise and devalue people with impairments as they were excluded from the mode of production. In other accounts, the period is one in which the dominant cultural paradigm for...

This volume provides a scholarly social history of disability, encompassing cultural, literary, social, political and medical history.