Event Description

The next Premodern Disability Histories Seminar (Warburg Institute) will host Elizabeth B. Bearden (UW Madison) on “Crip Authority and the Art of Consolation in Renaissance Representations of Disability.”

Having explored how discourses of monstrosity influence representations of disability in the global Renaissance in her 2019 monograph, Bearden’s talk will reflect on this project and will present material from her next book, which examines how canonical Renaissance writers and artists represent themselves and their work by drawing on the ancient tradition of consolation, or texts that offer comfort and remedy for worldly vicissitudes including mental and physical disability.

Consolation provides disabled writers with authoritative rhetorical, medical, and spiritual modes of crafting disability narratives that transgressively resignify disability identity into what Bearden calls “crip authority.” Paying attention to early modern disability discourse, and to what disabled authors say about their own embodiment and ideas, shows how central disability is to many canonical texts and concepts of the Renaissance that continue to influence our thinking about embodiment and its relation to aesthetics today.

Thursday, 25 Feb 2021, 17:00–18:30 GMT

Source: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23576

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