ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the Early Modern Period is an ‘interregnum’, a morbid crisis prone period. It argues that the tropos of disability can be emploted through a number of repertoires of invalidation. The chapter discusses the emergence of the ‘Protestant modern body’ and the arrival of a new model of normate embodiment that was suited to the rise of bourgeoisie as a significant player in the Proprium. The Renaissance spans the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, embracing, loosely, the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The Reformation, like the Renaissance, sat between the Middle Ages and Modernity. The Renaissance embodied a rebirth of classical ideas and aesthetics. Deformity was a Renaissance portrait of botched virtue; used pedagogically to demonstrate that manners and taste were the embodiment of physical and cultural capital. The Renaissance inaugurated a revival of aesthetic ableism, insofar as it provided a clearly articulated invalidating counterpoint to what Tobin Siebers called ‘disability aesthetics’.
