This project discusses how early modern legal and medical definitions of intellectual disability influenced the characterisation of fool characters in early modern English literature, 1500-1640. In particular, it is an attempt to go beyond a long-standing tradition in early modern criticism that has mainly focused on the fool’s performativity – folly as foolery – and the many moral, symbolic or rhetorical meanings of his foolishness. In doing so, most classic and recent scholarly essays on Renaissance fools have largely neglected the pragmatic, medical, psychological, or anthropological meanings of their supposed non-normative intelligence. This has been all the more evident in discussions of the so-called ‘wise fools’ or licensed jesters, namely Shakespeare’s, whose extraordinary skills tend to be emphasised, at the expense of analyses of what their ‘irrationality’ consists of. While criticism has sometimes – though cursorily – drawn attention to ‘natural fools’ – people who were supposedly born with intellectual disabilities – little has been done to identify either the ways in which such characters are shaped by early modern understandings of intelligence or to find out if there is an overlap between them and the wiser or more sophisticated types of fools (wise fools and clowns) presented in drama, prose works and poems. Moreover, there has too often been a tendency – epitomised by a seminal work such as Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961) – to see the fool as a variant of the madman type, significantly neglecting the fact that the early modern English society advocated an ontological separation between foolishness and madness: as a consequence, it cannot be assumed that literary fools’ intellectual variation can unproblematically be associated with early modern definitions of mental illness, madness or melancholy as have been illustrated by a great number of Renaissance scholars until very recently.
This research seeks therefore to expose the identity of all types of fools in early modern literary texts as ‘disabled’: both in the sense that these characters have or perform what in the period was recognised as an intellectual disability (a condition called ‘idiocy’, or ‘foolishness’, among a range of other terms) and in the sense that fools are ‘disabled’, or variously excluded, by society’s attitude and policies.
Objectives:
– Analyse ideas of idiocy in early modern English literature from the point of view of medicine and law, to complement the predominantly literary and cultural perspectives from which fools have been analysed so far.
• Examine medical theories and legal/social definitions of idiocy in Renaissance England and Europe, showing also how international such discourses were.
• Use that knowledge to study how fools, their brains, and actions are depicted in English literature, 1500-1640;
• Gain an enlarged, more comprehensive knowledge of the role and characteristics of fools within the texts, and in
the broader context of the literature of the period;
• Assess how early modern assumptions of idiocy change throughout the period;
• Redefine our understanding of the renaissance meaning of folly considering the issue from a legal/scientific perspective
