Disavowing Disability
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MCKENDRY Disavowing Disability examines the role that disability, both as a concept and an experience, played in seventeenth-century debates about salvation and religious practice. Exploring how the use and definition of the term “disability” functioned to allocate agency and culpability, this study argues that the post-Restoration imperative to capacitate “all men” – not just the “elect” – entailed a conceptual circumscription of disability, one premised on a Eighteenth-Century normative imputation of capability. The work of Richard Baxter, Connections sometimes considered a harbinger of ‘modernity’ and one of the most influential divines of the Long Eighteenth Century, elucidates this multifarious process of enabling. In constructing an ideology of ability that imposed moral self-determination, D Baxter encountered a germinal form of the “problem” of disability isavowing in liberal theory. While a strategy of “inclusionism” served to assimilate most manifestations of alterity, melancholy presented an Disavowing intractability that frustrated the logic of rehabilitation in fatal ways. D This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. isability Disability Andrew McKendry is Associate Professor of English Literature at Richard Baxter and the Nord University. Conditions of Salvation About the Series Series Editors Exploring connections between verbal Eve Tavor Bannet and visual texts and the people, networks, University of Andrew McKendry cultures and places that engendered Oklahoma and enjoyed them during the long Rebecca Bullard Eighteenth Century, this innovative series University of also examines the period’s uses of oral, Reading written and visual media, and experiments with the digital platform to facilitate communication of original scholarship with both colleagues and students. Cover image: Astronomical Observations: Comet, by Donato Creti, 1711, 18th Century, oil on canvas, 51 x 35 cm. Vatican City, Vatican Museums. (Photo by Art Collection 3 / Alamy Stock Photo) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:47:37, subject to ISSNthe Cambridge 2632-5578 Core(online) terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913515 ISSN 2632-556X (print) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:47:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913515 Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections edited by Eve Tavor Bannet University of Oklahoma Rebecca Bullard University of Reading DISAVOWING DISABILITY Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation Andrew McKendry Nord University Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:47:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913515 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108823128 DOI: 10.1017/9781108913515 © Andrew McKendry 2021 This work is in copyright. 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When citing this work, please include a reference to the DOI 10.1017/9781108913515 First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-108-82312-8 Paperback ISSN 2632-5578 (online) ISSN 2632-556X (print) Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:47:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913515 Disavowing Disability Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections DOI: 10.1017/9781108913515 First published online: July 2021 Andrew McKendry Nord University Author for correspondence: Andrew McKendry, [email protected] Abstract: Disavowing Disability examines the role that disability, both as a concept and an experience, played in seventeenth-century debates about salvation and religious practice. Exploring how the use and definition of the term “disability” functioned to allocate agency and culpability, this study argues that the post-Restoration imperative to capacitate “all men”–not just the “elect”–entailed a conceptual circumscription of disability, one premised on a normative imputation of capability. The work of Richard Baxter, sometimes considered a harbinger of ‘modernity’ and one of the most influential divines of the Long Eighteenth Century, elucidates this multifarious process of enabling. In constructing an ideology of ability that imposed moral self-determination, Baxter encountered a germinal form of the “problem” of disability in liberal theory. While a strategy of “inclusionism” served to assimilate most manifestations of alterity, melancholy presented an intractability that frustrated the logic of rehabilitation in fatal ways. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. This Element also has a video abstract: www.cambridge.org/mckendry Keywords: disability, religion, liberalism, melancholy, Richard Baxter © Andrew McKendry 2021 ISBNs: 9781108823128 (PB), 9781108913515 (OC) ISSNs: 2632-5578 (online), 2632-556X (print) Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:47:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913515 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Contexts and Connections 5 3 Enabling “Every Man” 15 4 Disputing Disability, Conditioning Salvation 21 5 Diversity, Inclusion(ism), Discipline 38 6 Melancholy, Means, Ends 49 7 Conclusion 61 References 64 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 25 Sep 2021 at 05:47:37, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913515 Disavowing Disability 1 1 Introduction From colonial classrooms to Allied trenches, the exploits of John Bunyan’s redoubtable “Christian” have provided such a sedimented mythos of masculine self-mastery that we can easily forget how haphazard, even clumsy, his progress often is. For modern readers, plagued as we are with more despair than demonic foes, few episodes of Pilgrim’s Progress seem so touch-and-go as his run-in with the “Giant Despair,” a castle-doctrine landowner who pressures his des- pondent prisoners to kill themselves. After more than a week of starvation and beatings in the dungeon, Christian escapes improbably with a key he has had all along.1 A simple pillar is erected to warn later travelers, but the burden of actually conquering Despair is left to the unlikely heroes of the undersung 1684 sequel: women, children, “halt,” and “feebleminded.” Though it is the super- human Great-Heart who decapitates the giant, it is ultimately these “weakly” pilgrims who protect the reader from despair. As an updated pillar explains, any who doubt their deliverance from despair can find assurance in the (illustrated) dancing of “Ready-to-halt,” who “could not dance without one Crutch in his Hand,” but still “footed it well.”2 Along with his fellow traveler “Feeblemind,” these “weak” pilgrims figure quite prominently in the narrative, explicitly serving to consecrate communal values such as care, companionship, and mutual accommodation. Neither rehabilitated nor cured, “Ready-to-halt” and “Feeblemind” attest to the fact, noted by scholars such as Lennard Davis and Kim Nielsen,3 that cultural history abounds with disability, appearing as it does in poems, songs, diaries, letters, paintings, engravings, sermons, and even objects. As Douglas Baynton put it, “disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.”4 Indeed, we need not look far for discussions of disability in Bunyan. He argued elsewhere that the transformative process of conversion emerged from disabil- ity – not just contrition or spiritual “trouble,” but “a heart disabled ...as a man whose bones are broken, is disabled, as to his way of running, leaping, [or] wrestling.”5 The very deliberateness with which Bunyan connects “disability” to impairment,6 however, reveals the quagmire that any history of disability encounters from the outset. The term had a different meaning in Bunyan’sday 1 Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 150–154. 2 Bunyan, Second Part, 181.