Comment from the Field

The Autumn 2012 meeting of Northern Renaissance Seminar was held at Leeds Trinity University College on 8 September 2012, with theme of Disability and Renaissance. The theme was intended to address a perceived lack of engagement thus far with critical theory by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture.The conference organizer, Dr Susan Anderson of Leeds Trinity, welcomed delegates and introduced keynote speaker, Dr Allison Hobgood from Willamette University, Oregon. Hobgood's talk, Modern Disability Studies: Beholding Milton, started with a discussion of ethical beholding as a way of avoiding excluding people from critical discourse, and as a way of combating normative encouragement to ignore difference. Hobgood argued that disabled was an operational identity category in English Renaissance and that representations of in period are not always merely metaphorical, but can also tell us something of lived experience of people. Indeed, she asserted that material conditions of illness, injury, and childbirth would have made impairment more rather than less visible than it is now.The second part of keynote speech was a round-up of state of field in USA, detailing current research on aspects of as diverse as dwarf aesthetics in The Faerie Queene, and autism and theory of mind in connection with Book of Common Prayer. Hobgood's vision for future of studies in early modern period necessitates resisting charges of anachronism in order to enable socially responsible dialogue anti-ableist politics and advocacy in scholarship and teaching.The final part of keynote speech was a Miltonic case study, critiquing traditional scholarly discourses surrounding Milton's blindness and instead positioning Paradise Lost as part of a disability aesthetic. In this paradigm Milton's God is the ultimate normate and his angels are ableist superhumans, while Satan stands against their definitions of what it means to be fit.Following keynote speech, first panel, chaired by Dr Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster University) was on Sexuality. Dr Amritesh Singh, from University of York, spoke on Masculinities in Mary Sidney's The Tragedie of Antonie, looking at links between compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory (marital) heterosexuality. The paper examined crisis that occurs when a body becomes by age or injury and how this impacts on gender. The other paper in this panel was my bisexual approach to examining liminality of gender and psyche in Spenser and Shakespeare, an argument that these texts offer ways to present positive, festive outcomes for madness. This reading was welcomed as being particularly important to a presentist approach to early modern texts, taking into account impact of exclusionary readings for present-day queer and spectators and readers.The next panel was devoted to and was chaired by keynote speaker Allison Hobgood. Dr Liam Haydon, from Manchester University, spoke on Milton and Universal Blindness, arguing that Paradise Lost is not an account of an individual's blindness but rather taps into an early modern metaphorical understanding of blindness as denoting a loss of virtue. Haydon compared quotations from Paradise Lost with King James and Geneva Bible verses from Psalms, describing being compassed about by enemies and calling for help. Haydon argued that doubly reconfigures his own and challenges his audience to see right. Then Adleen Crapo from Toronto presented her paper Staging Disabled Authorship in Early Modern Literature: The Cases of Paul Scarron and John Milton, focusing on two writers with acquired disabilities. Crapo outlined how their enemies and detractors used Milton's blindness and Scarron's physical deformities (probably caused by rheumatic fever) to call their morality into question, and how both men used rhetoric and self-publicity to counter these accusations. …

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