Crip Authority: Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Renaissance
Crip Authority: Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Renaissance
by Elizabeth Bearden
University of Michigan Press, 2025
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-472-07761-8
Paper: 978-0-472-05761-0
eISBN: 978-0-472-90519-5 (OA)
About the Book
Crip Authority explores how Renaissance writers and artists with disabilities drew on consolatory literature to enhance their authority and create a sense of disability community across the centuries. Elizabeth B. Bearden considers how Renaissance writers and artists understood their lived experiences of disability by drawing on the ancient genre of consolation, which aims to comfort people for a variety of hardships, including mental and physical disability. Renaissance writers used the art of consolation to resignify the mental and physical disabilities that their society frequently scorned into an expression of their military, spiritual, political, and most importantly for this study, writerly authority. Bearden names this kind of defiant authorial self-representation crip authority, thereby transgressively cripping our society’s ableist notions of who has the ability and authority to write.
Disabled authors include Francesco Petrarca, Teresa de Cartagena, Giovani Paolo Lomazzo, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Robert Burton, and John Milton. They all explore their experiences of disability, but their work has rarely or never been considered from a disability studies perspective. Bearden thus brings today’s models of disability studies and crip theory together with early modern articulations of disability based on ancient and Renaissance models of military, political, biblical, and literary authority. In sum, Crip Authority makes a significant contribution to the growing field of early modern disability studies and invites us to rethink the extent of crip history and the endurance of disability gain.
Disabled authors include Francesco Petrarca, Teresa de Cartagena, Giovani Paolo Lomazzo, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Robert Burton, and John Milton. They all explore their experiences of disability, but their work has rarely or never been considered from a disability studies perspective. Bearden thus brings today’s models of disability studies and crip theory together with early modern articulations of disability based on ancient and Renaissance models of military, political, biblical, and literary authority. In sum, Crip Authority makes a significant contribution to the growing field of early modern disability studies and invites us to rethink the extent of crip history and the endurance of disability gain.
About the Author
Elizabeth B. Bearden is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Reviews
“Crip Authority offers a profound and powerful contribution to the dignity and authority of disabilities. It will provide a very welcome contribution to several disciplines through its fresh, brilliant, and new insights on texts that have been the subject of study for centuries.”— Marina Brownlee, Princeton University
“Crip Authority is an exceptional piece of scholarship and will become a foundational text in both early modern studies and disability studies. This is a book that will launch hundreds of other books, and its insights will ignite ideas within and beyond academia.”— Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Luther College
Tags
Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability, Renaissance 1450-1600, People with disabilities in literature, Art Renaissance, Consolation, Disability, Renaissance, Literary Collections, European, Social conditions, Art, Social aspects, Europe, Literary Criticism, Social Science
Open Access Information
License: CC BY-NC
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