Idiocy and the Conceptual Economy of Madness

The binary relationship between ‘intellectual disability’ and ‘mental illness’ is widely regarded as self-evident and long-established. This chapter demonstrates that the historical, and continuing, relationship between intellectual disability and psychiatry is, in fact, ambiguous and inconsistent. Beginning with the nosology of William Cullen in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the chapter explores the dispersal of madness across all the branches of disease and illness. The advent of alienism and Pinel’s nosology of madness, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, produced much flatter conceptual structures, in which idiocy was one of the various forms of madness. As psychiatry developed, the position of idiocy shifted. Maudsley located it in a separate branch, though still not separated in a binary manner from insanity. Lastly, the nosology of the neurologist Spitzka became more nuanced and layered, though still without a binary separation of idiocy. The chapter takes the view that the lack of any consistent underlying paradigm in psychiatry will continue to make the presence and position of intellectual disability impossible to fix. Psychoanalytic and neo-Jasperian psychiatry thoroughly exclude it as an object of investigation.

‘Some have it from Birth, Some by Disposition’:1 Foolishness in Medieval German Literature

This chapter examines depictions of fools in Middle High German literature to demonstrate that the medieval idea of folly is more complex than a simple opposition to reason, and to ascertain if there are notions of intellectual disability in the German Middle Ages. To understand medieval ideas of foolishness, this chapter explores the difference between ‘will fool’ and ‘natural fool’ as depicted by Konrad von Megenberg in the 14th century. This medieval differentiation is then tracked through several different Middle High German texts, including the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Middle High German stories Die halbe Birne and Des Mönches Not.

‘A Defect in the Mind’: Cognitive Ableism in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

While John Locke’s impact on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, an eighteenth-century satire, is a well-worn topic of scholarly discussion, Gulliver as the butt of a satire concerning an important aspect of Lockean epistemology has not been considered. In the 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke distinguishes between person (an abstract thinker) and man (an individual with a human shape but little capacity for thought). Locke’s differentiation underwrites the modern concept of intellectual and developmental disabilities. Cognitive ableism is the belief in the superiority of person over man, of the thinker over the individual with less capacity for thought. Approaching Book Four of the Travels from a disability studies perspective, this chapter argues that Locke’s person/man binary broadly comes into play, that the character of Gulliver straddles the person/man divide, and that his characterization parodies Locke’s distinction. Book Four satirizes cognitive ableism through its protagonist, who exhibits an extreme form of it.

Exclusion from the Eucharist: The Re-shaping of Idiocy in the Seventeenth-Century Church

Throughout the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, churchmen disagreed about whom to exclude from taking holy communion, who should do the excluding, and how this exclusion should be imposed. The constant reclassifications of potential contaminants of church ritual fluctuated in tandem with larger socio-political processes. The ferocity of the debate in the 1650s reflects that decade’s social revolutionary chaos. Near the end of it, the label ‘idiot’ – whatever that may mean – arrives on the list, emerging from a dialectic of disputes which acknowledge the socio-political context. In that particular deployment of the label we start to see an outline of the modern psychological definition.

Visiting Earlswood: The Asylum Travelogue and the Shaping of ‘Idiocy’

In the 1850s, visitors to the Earlswood Asylum, also known as the National Asylum for Idiots, in Reigate, Surrey, wrote about their experiences for publication. Frequently, these reports were presented as forms of travel writing, with the narrator recounting the customs of the asylum natives. The middle-class, sane and (one assumes) intelligent target audiences lived far beyond the asylums, in terms of identity if not geography. The asylum inhabitants, meanwhile, are resolutely ‘other’, subjected to the visitors’ inquisitive, evaluative gaze. This chapter draws on primary documents including works by Charles Dickens and asylum propagandists such as Joseph Parkinson, Cheyne Brady and the Reverend Edwin Sidney, as well as numerous anonymous pieces, to explore how these asylum travelogues, through their own representations of ‘idiocy’, helped shape ideas of idiocy and inform social policy that affected the lives of people identified as ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ in the 1850s, 1860s and after.

Peter the ‘Wild Boy’: What Peter Means to Us

Peter the Wild Boy was famous in his day as a feral child who provided inspiration and example for philosophical debates about nature and nurture, and the essential qualities of humanity. Openstorytellers, a performance company whose members have intellectual and learning disabilities, has developed a performance and workshop based on his story. In this chapter the members of Openstorytellers reflect on the implications of the ways Peter is represented in literature and popular culture, and draw important connections between his life and their own.

Conceptualization of Intellectual Disability in Medieval English Law

Medieval terminology for mental health was a complex matrix of identifiers from legal, medical, and social sources and included terms for many mental, emotional, neurotic and psychotic conditions recognized today. Intellectual disability was one of those categories, especially in the legal realm, with the most-often used term being idiota. Governmental officials that became aware of properties in distress (unplanted, squatters ruining a site, etc) relieved individuals identified as idiota of their responsibilities and placed them into wardship with guardians, who not only cared for the wards but also their properties. The process of examination and civil ‘diagnosis’ of ability encompassed an individual’s intelligence, memory, cognitive ability, discretion, and, at times, appearance. The medieval terms, while not ‘intellectual disability’, certainly described differences in intellectual ability and used vocabulary appropriate for separate conditions, identifying a faulty memory, weak intelligence, difficult time managing property or goods, issue with coping day-to-day, or inability to have discretion. Medieval legal and administrative arms of the crown and local towns each used their own standards to judge competency and intelligence, yet all of them recognized the same wide variety of intellectual conditions and categories of symptoms for intellectual disabilities and other mental health conditions.

‘Belief’, ‘Opinion’, and ‘Knowledge’: The Idiot in Law in the Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter explores the development of the legal concepts of idiocy and imbecility over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining legal theory as well as evidence from civil court cases to reveal an ongoing conflict between libertarian resistance to state intervention in the lives of citizens, however mentally incapacitated they might be, and a belief that the state should be responsible for protecting individuals against exploitation and the corruption of bloodlines. From the late eighteenth century, French medico-legal theorists, supported by the ‘scientific’ enlightenment ideals of the French revolution, proposed a medicalised appropriation of legal decision-making over capacity. While these ideas gained some currency among a small group of British medical men working in the field of idiocy, they faced strong public and legal resistance throughout the nineteenth century on the grounds of liberty of the subject. Both legal and medical formulations of idiocy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries borrowed heavily from popular, ‘common-sense’ public notions about what constituted an idiot.

Sensationalism and the Construction of Intellectual Disability

The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the emergence of sensationalism as a counter to the prevailing idea that human knowledge was innate, pre-determined within us, only to emerge gradually over time. This chapter considers the influence of the theory of sensationalism on both the conceptualization of intellectual disability and the emergence of educational efforts on their behalf. It considers how the debate over sensationalism shaped Itard’s work and the theories which underpinned it, rooted most fully in the work of Locke, Rousseau, and, finally, Condillac, whose revision of Locke would create the foundation for the coming medico-psychological hegemony over intellectual disability.

‘Will-Nots’ and ‘Cannots’: Tracing a Trope in Medieval Thought

For medieval thinkers, a prominent philosophical, religious and legal problem concerned how to distinguish between the ‘will-not’ and the ‘can-not’. Amassing medieval evidence for the characterization these 'types', this chapter considers the tension between people regarded as not wanting to do something and people incapable of doing something despite perhaps wanting to. The 'genuine fool' was accorded preferential treatment in all these realms, but the 'pretend fool' was regarded with suspicion, and was perceived as morally dubious, even dangerous. Precisely because cognitive disability is not something writ large on the body, like a crippled limb, medieval commentators were worried by it, just as they were worried by deafness (equally invisible and also causing communication and moral issues). It is the behaviour rather than the physique that is highlighted as being different from 'the norm'. It is a sign of more modern times that physical appearance comes to be more strongly linked to cognitive disability. Medieval children appear to have been categorised by their learning ability as expressed through behaviour, not physiognomy.