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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Early Modern Literature and Disability

Neurodiversity in Early Modern English Literature

Edited by Bridger M. Bartlett, Bradley J. Irish and Laura Seymour

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Published 30 April 2027

About this book

Showcases a variety of neurodivergent ways of engaging with early modern texts

  • Centres neurodivergent ways of reading and writing literature
  • Examines a wide range of experiences from a neurodivergent angle, including dyslexia, bad crip feelings, military trauma, grief, sickness, and ADHD
  • Provides illuminating readings of a variety of texts including Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus, and the writings of Margaret Cavendish and George Trosse
  • Develops, and engages with, several theoretical frameworks that readers will find useful including neuroqueer theory and ADHDness
  • Uplifts the work of neurodivergent scholars, many of them early career researchers

In the last two decades, researchers in a variety of fields have begun to pay increasing attention to neurodiversity – that is, the fact that human minds are not neurologically uniform. This collection is intended to galvanise the recent interest in Renaissance literary neurodiversity in particular and serves as an anchor for the developing field of early modern neurodiversity studies. Neurodiversity in Early Modern English Literature analyses the ways in which divergent, different, and neuroqueer bodyminds created and appeared in drama, prose, life-writing, book-collecting and poetry. Centring neurodivergent experiences and ways of thinking in both the early modern era and the present day, this book embraces the diversity of neurodivergence and its intersections with race, social class and gender.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors

Introduction: What is Early Modern Neurodiversity?
Bridger M. Bartlett, Bradley J. Irish, and Laura Seymour

PART I: RECOGNITION
1. How To Think About the Neurological Past: Some Ways of Doing Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies
Bradley J. Irish
2. ‘None Durst Venture Within Two Poles’ Length, Nor Some Within the Length of Paul’s’: Health Anxiety and Maladaptive Behaviours in the Plague Pamphlet The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary
Lorna Giltrow-Shaw
3. ‘Not knowing the Meaning of the Voice’: Neurodivergence in the Puritan/Dissenting Writing of John Bunyan, John Milton and George Trosse?
David Parry
4. ‘To Live by Remembrance in After-Ages’: Reading Margaret Cavendish’s Legacy through the Neurodiversity Paradigm
Olivia Henderson
5. Neuroqueering the Macbeths: Gender, Neurodivergence and (Hyper)Ability in the Scottish Play
Nic Helms and L. Bellee Jones-Pierce
6. Racialising Discourses of Child-Changing and Untimely Development in Romeo and Juliet
Bridger M. Bartlett

PART II: WAYS OF BEING
7. ‘Arm Thy Heart and Fit Thy Thought’: Thinking through Trauma and Racecraft in Titus Andronicus
Deyasini Dasgupta
8. To Be in the Bad Books: Reimagining ADHD and Hamlet’s ‘Bad Quarto’
Emily Rose Nicholls
9. 'The Heart's Disquiet is Revenge Most Deep' – Exploring the Power of Neurodivergent Bad Feelings with John Marston’s The Malcontent (c.1603)
Laura Seymour
10. The Joy of Homeless Madness in Brome’s The Antipodes
Avi Mendelson
11. ‘Another book I bought’. Samuel Pepys and the (Im)possibility of Historical ADHDness
Laura Basten

PART III: PRACTICE
12. ‘Autistic Meaning’ and Augustinian Soliloquy in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy
Nathan Pensky
13. Reimagining A Midsummer Night’s Dream Through a Non-Ableist Lens
Bríd Phillips, Sessina Figueiredo, Bahareh Afsharnejad and Sonya Girdler
14. ‘I Pray, Sir, can you read?’ Seeing Dyslexia in Shakespeare as a Dyslexic Shakespearian
Jamie Paris

Coda: Shakespeare is Autistic
Sonya Freeman Loftis

Index

About the contributors

Bridger M. Bartlett

Bridger M. Bartlett is Postdoctoral Research Associate with the eArly Modern NeuroDivergence (AMEND) project at Swansea University. Their research focuses on early modern English culture and neurodiversity as one among many intersectional considerations. They are currently finalizing a first monograph on the interplay of neuronormativity and religion in early modern English constructions of racial and national difference; their next project applies Renaissance and contemporary rhetorical theory to the imbrication of neuro- and gender divergence across early modern genres. Their work has appeared in ELH, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, the collection Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern Culture, and elsewhere.

Bradley J. Irish

Bradley J. Irish is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University, where he works on early modern emotion and early modern neurodiversity. He is the author of Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (2018), Shakespeare and Disgust: The History and Science of Early Modern Revulsion (2023), The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature (2025), The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities (2025), Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions (2025), and (with Melinda Marks and Emily Rose Nicholls) the forthcoming Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies: An Introduction. He is co-editor of Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2021) and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion (2022), and currently serves as an editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary journal Emotion Review.

Laura Seymour

Laura Seymour is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University. She is PI of the collaborative project AMEND – Early Modern European Neurodivergence (2025-2030), funded by the Wellcome Trust. Laura is the author of Refusing to Behave in Early Modern Literature (2022), Shakespeare and Neurodiversity (2025) and Early Modern Neurodivergence (2026) and various articles and book chapters on neurodivergence and early modern literature.

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