This collection explores the historical origins of our modern concepts
of intellectual or learning disability. The essays, from some of the
leading historians of ideas of intellectual disability, focus on British
and European material from the Middle Ages to the late-nineteenth
century and extend across legal, educational, literary, religious,
philosophical and psychiatric histories. They investigate how precursor
concepts and discourses were shaped by and interacted with their
particular social, cultural and intellectual environments, eventually
giving rise to contemporary ideas. Intellectual disability is essential
reading for scholars interested in the history of intelligence,
intellectual disability and related concepts, as well as in disability
history generally.