Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500-1640

This book discusses how early modern legal and medical definitions of intellectual disability influenced the characterisation of fool characters in early modern English literature. .

Alice Equestri is a researcher and lecturer in early modern English literature at the University of Padua. Between 2017 and 2019, she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie researcher at the University of Sussex. She is the author of ’Armine... Thou Art a Foole and Knave’: The Fools of Shakespeare’s Romances (2016) and has published on folly in early modern culture, on Shakespeare’s last plays, and on Renaissance translation.