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This book elucidates how Renaissance writers used monstrosity to imagine what we now call disability      Monstrous Kinds is the first  book to explore textual representations of disability in the global  Renaissance. Elizabeth B. Bearden contends that monstrosity, as a  precursor to modern concepts of disability, has much to teach about our  tendency to inscribe disability with meaning. Understanding how early  modern writers approached disability not only provides more accurate  genealogies of disability, but also helps nuance current aesthetic and  theoretical disability formulations. The book analyzes the cultural valences of early modern disability  across a broad national and chronological span, attending to the  specific bodily, spatial, and aesthetic systems that contributed to  early modern literary representations of disability. The cross section  of texts (including conduct books and treatises, travel writing and  wonder books) is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as  Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary  exchange.  Bearden questions grand narratives that convey a progression  of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen, suggesting  that, instead, these categories coexist and intersect.  “An excellent, timely, and necessary book that upends the problematic  assumption in contemporary disability studies that norming influences  didn’t exist in premodern societies. Highly interdisciplinary, Monstrous Kinds is an important contribution to both premodern and contemporary disability studies.”—Allison P. Hobgood, Willamette University“An innovative book that will significantly contribute to the  growing body of knowledge of Renaissance disability. The variety of  texts examined from different geographical areas and languages, and the  in-depth analysis of the works and images, are outstanding.” —Encarnación Juárez-Almendros, University of Notre Dame Winner of the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities Illustration courtesy Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Cover description: The cover is a vibrant shade of red with contrasting  white and yellow type. Set against this background and to the left is an  image of conjoined adult female twins, joined from the chest down.  Their torso and breasts are bare and they are draped below the waist.  Elizabeth B. Bearden is Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison.    More infos on the editor website  