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. 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
Index