This book engages with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to the social history of medicine, literature and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers (Canguilhem, Foucault, Hacking), as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists (Durkheim, Goffman) and anthropologists (Benedict, Douglas, Mead). Such a plurality of approaches and diversity of theoretical background requires clarification of terms, not least because the issues of norms, normalisation and normativity are contested, and subject-specific methodologies and conceptual points of reference necessarily imbue terms with varied meanings.