ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that viewing disability simply through the lens of marginality and exclusion ignores the wide range of experiences of 'disabled' people in the early modern past. It explains the ways in which historians have approached disabled people in the past and evaluates different modes of thinking about social inclusion or exclusion of people with impairments in the early modern period. The chapter examines these themes in greater detail via an analysis of the portrayals of inhabitants of the Shropshire village of Myddle as provided by its famous early eighteenth-century chronicler, the antiquarian Richard Gough. Historians have also begun to explore in depth the social position of people with disabilities in the medieval and early modern periods. The pre-industrial agrarian economy has sometimes been cast as a kind of antediluvian era for people with disabilities, in which they were still able to participate in household production and sell their labour, before succumbing to the economic marginalization associated with industrialization.
