A History of Intelligence and 'Intellectual Disability': The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe

by C.F. Goodey

Starting with the hypothesis that not only human intelligence but also its antithesis 'intellectual disability' are nothing more than historical contingencies, C.F. Goodey's paradigm-shifting study traces the rich interplay between labelled human types and the radically changing characteristics attributed to them. From the twelfth-century beginnings of European social administration to the onset of formal human science disciplines in the modern era, A History of Intelligence and 'Intellectual Disability' reconstructs the socio-political and religious contexts of intellectual ability and disability, and demonstrates how these concepts became part of psychology, medicine and biology. Goodey examines a wide array of classical, late medieval and Renaissance texts, from popular guides on conduct and behavior to medical treatises and from religious and philosophical works to poetry and drama. Focusing especially on the period between the Protestant Reformation and 1700, Goodey challenges the accepted wisdom that would have us believe that 'intelligence' and 'disability' describe natural, trans-historical realities. Instead, Goodey argues for a model that views intellectual disability and indeed the intellectually disabled person as recent cultural creations. His book is destined to become a standard resource for scholars interested in the history of psychology and medicine, the social origins of human self-representation, and current ethical debates about the genetics of intelligence.

The Open Access version of this book, available at has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Genres: Disability, Psychology, Disability Studies, History

373 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2011

Reviews

[bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

i've recently heard that you shouldn't punish books for not being the book you wanted them to be. and yet.

i do enjoy a visibly irritated author and there's a lot of great nuggets in here, a lot of unquestioned idea questioners, and yet i wish not only that this was a more integrated social history with a closer look at THE Historical Record of People's Lives alongside the philosophical/epistemological history of thinkers' writings but also, and this might be the same thing, that rather than primarily emphasizing "we assume that when people said xyz they were referring to what we now call disabled people, but actually they meant a very different conception of person with different qualifications" it more thoroughly answered the question of what people today marked and siloed as intellectual disabled were up to in the early modern period across classes and how they navigated / lived in / were received by their communities. like i believe you that we have conflated a lot of things from our modern lens as we determinedly invent people to consider permanently and intrinsically "less than" but people have also always experienced material differences from one another, as the author points out-- ????