Though scholars of early modern England have become increasingly interested in the topic of disability, there has been relatively less attention devoted to issues relating to what theorists call neurodivergence—that is, types of psychological and cognitive processing variance that result in a mind's non-normative relationship to the world it inhabits, as in experiences designated Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADD/ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Tourette Syndrome , and so on. This essay sets out a research agenda for early modern neurodiversity studies by surveying the important foundational work that does exist and by establishing a conceptual map of where this emerging field might go.
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Bartlett et al. (2025) studied this question.
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