This collection explores how concepts of intellectual disability evolved from a range of influences, eventually converging with earlier and decidedly distinct ideas, including 'idiocy' and 'folly', which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments.
The book brings together essays from some of the leading historians of ideas of intellectual disability, and extends across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories. Maintaining a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts, it demonstrates how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural and intellectual environments in which they took form, and also shows how they performed important functions within these environments.
Focusing on British and European material from the Middle Ages to the late-nineteenth century, the collection asks 'how and why did these concepts form?' 'how did they connect with one another?' and 'what historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?' But, while the essays focus on the forces shaping ideas of intelligence and disability, they also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.
Intellectual disability is essential reading for scholars interested in the history of intelligence, intellectual disability and related concepts, as well as in disability and social history generally.

Patrick McDonagh is a faculty member in the Department of English at Concordia University, Montreal and co-founder of the Spectrum Society for Community Living in Vancouver
C. F. Goodey is Honorary Fellow in the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Leicester
Tim Stainton is Professor in the School of Social Work and Director of the Centre for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver

1 Introduction: the emergent critical history of intellectual disability - Patrick McDonagh, C. F. Goodey, and Tim Stainton
2 Conceptualization of intellectual disability in medieval English law - Wendy J. Turner
3 'Will-nots' and 'Cannots': tracing a trope in medieval thought - Irina Metzler
4 'Some have it from birth, some by disposition': foolishness in medieval German literature - Janina Dillig
5 Exclusion from the eucharist: the seventeenth-century church and the creation of 'intellectually' disabled people - C. F. Goodey
6 'A defect in the mind': cognitive ableism in Swift's Gulliver's Travels - D. Christopher Gabbard
7 The age of sensationalism and the construction of intellectual disability - Tim Stainton
8 Peter the 'wild boy': what Peter means to us - Katie Branch, Clemma Fleat, Nicola Grove, Tim Lumley Smith, and Robin Meader
9 'Belief', 'opinion', and 'knowledge': the idiot in law in the the long eighteenth century - Simon Jarrett
10 Idiocy and the conceptual economy of madness - Murray K. Simpson
11 Visiting Earlswood: the asylum travelogue and the shaping of 'idiocy' - Patrick McDonagh
Select bibliography
Index