Neurodivergence

Neurodivergence means thinking, feeling, sensing, and/or behaving in ways that differ from norms about how the human mind ‘ought’ to function, and/or from other people’s minds. Nick Walker notes that ‘neuro’ means ‘nerve’ and so neurodivergence refers ‘not just to the brain but to the entire nervous system—and, by extension, to the full complexity of human cognition and the central role the nervous system plays in the embodied dance of consciousness’.¹ These norms can shift and change between communities and cultures, and over time. Early modern people did not understand what we now call neurodivergence in a single or homogenous way because, as Helen Hackett reminds us, the early modern era was home to numerous competing theories of the mind and its relationship to the soul and body. Though she focuses on Elizabethan England, Hackett’s summary applies to early modern Europe as a whole: ‘it was a time of intense interest in the mind, when old and new intellectual frameworks intersected and clashed’, where ‘thinking about the mind was not stable or homogeneous, and cannot be reduced to a single framework. Rather, it was a rich, complex, tumultuous brew of competing ideas from diverse sources’.²

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Though our map project focuses on early modern Europe, this does not mean that we have to understand it in a solely European way. Vishnu Nair, Warda Farah, and Mildred Boveda write that a decolonial framework ‘liberates and reconceptualizes neurodiversity itself as one of the theories explaining diversity of bodyminds and as part of a vast global knowledge continuum rather than a singular dominant Western notion imposing itself onto other knowledge systems’.³ Indigenous disability studies scholars have shown that many neurodiversity-studies concepts have long existed in Indigenous worldviews, and can be productively improved and challenged by Indigenous thought. Lexi (Giizhigokwe) Nahwegiizhic emphasises that ‘Indigenous cultures have always focused on what is best for the community’, while Lavonna L Lovern’s Indigenous approach focuses on ’experiential sameness’, and the value of ’difference wisdom’: the wisdom people acquired from their different experiences and talents; no person has all knowledge or all talents so we work best in interconnected community.⁴ In the early modern era specifically, Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies is ‘devoted to discussing the many ways in which black lives mattered in the early Renaissance—not just as part of the story about what Europeans were doing but as the story itself...a move that inherently disrupts current Eurocentric epistemologies’. Several of the people in our map—like Anton Wilhelm Amo and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo—journeyed to several continents.

Whilst modern-day Europeans might understand neurodivergence in a rather secular way, for early modern people religion was a key framework for understanding people who were different. Orthodox Christianity and Islam are indispensable frameworks for understanding the texts about Archpriest Avvakum and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo in the map, for example. Julia Gebke and Julia Heinemann name ‘social status, religion, marital status, or familial networks’ as key frameworks for understanding disability and neurodivergence in early modern Europe. Though in the present day we often see plenty of overlap between neurodivergence and disability—and between neurodiversity studies and disability studies—this was not always the case for early moderns. On the one hand, humoral understandings of the body (the levels of heat, cold, and different fluids of the bodies) posited a strong link between (dis)ability of the mind and body. On the other, Daniel Blackie, Jenni Kuuliala, Riikka Miettinen, and Godelinde Gertrude Perk argue, ‘To early modern Europeans, the idea that people they labelled as “idiots” had much in common with amputees or that both groups belonged to a special social category would have seemed absurd’. 

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Early Modern Europe

The word Europe nowadays evokes numerous different emotions and ideas. In the early modern era, ‘Europe’ was a more rarely-used term than it is today. In the period 1550-1750, the European continent was a mix of cultures. The Ottoman Empire, for example covered much of southeast Europe, west Asia, and North Africa, whilst the reach of the Catholic church extended across much of central, Western, and southern Europe, and into other continents. A subject of the Ottoman Empire might view Istanbul as their central city, whilst a Catholic follower of the Pope might tell you that the centre of Europe was Rome. Many of early modern Europe’s laws, languages, and cultures were influenced by an Empire that had already been and gone (and which the Ottomans in no small part modelled themselves on): the Roman Empire which spread across Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. As Anthony Pagden notes, the word ‘Europe’ came from mythology and was the name of an Asian woman kidnapped by the Asian hero Aeneas: Europa. 

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Many early moderns did not think of themselves as European. Their world might be encompassed by their town or village, or they might think of themselves in wider terms, for instance as part of a Christendom which ideally should not be limited to Europe but should convert people across the whole world. Rather than being linked by a common European identity, early modern people more often forged common ties with each other by a shared religion, language, or social status. They might think of themselves primarily as belonging to a homeland (such as Spain), rather than to Europe, or understand themselves as part of a racial and/or religious group with a history, present, and future both inside and outside Europe. Intercultural communication and trade, and travel both willing and forced, occurred prolifically within Europe, and between Europe and other continents. As researchers like Su Fang Ng, Carmen Noccentelli, and Chunjie Zhang explain, this entailed that non-European knowledges shaped Europeans understandings of themselves and of Europe. Neil Oddy writes that early modern French writers invoked the idea of Europe rather rarely, and often did so in order to use Europe as a vantage point from which to contrast themselves with people from Africa or South America and to erase disagreements between European countries for strategic purposes. Filled with social, political, and religious unrest, Oddy concludes, early modern Europe was ‘no place in which to ground a stable collective identity’. 

Many of the ideas we invoke in our work as humanities researchers today—ideas like history and historiography, critique, theories of translation and signification, and practices of interdisciplinarity—were also being theorised about and developed by early moderns in Europe, in conversation and knowledge-exchange with people from the wider world. Though we do not always come to the same answers, we often address similar questions to those that occupied people in early modern Europe, questions like What is a mind? What is a person? Is there a ‘best’ way to think and behave? What makes some people different to others?

 

A Map

The map will be designed to be accessible to neurodivergent people, including screen-reader users. We will continue to use colours and fonts that are very accessible. After surveying neurodivergent people about what format they would prefer to access information about early modern neurodivergence, we learned that a map seemed best. Before being launched, the map will be tested by a diverse group of neurodivergent people to test its accessibility. We were inspired by other mapping projects like Medieval and Early Modern Orients, and digital humanities scholarship 

using mapmaking software by Rachael Deagman Simonetta and Melanie Lo, and John Harrison and Ahon Gooptu.

Searching for neurodivergence in early modern archives means staying aware of the ways in which white and ableist methodologies and ways of cataloguing exclude the stories of neurodivergent people. Michelle Caswell writes that ‘dominant Western archival theory enacts white supremacist violence by constructing core concepts like records and evidence based on white temporal imaginaries without placing them historically, social, or culturally’. Many people and communities, Caswell explains, create and preserve ‘oral, kinetic, or performative records’ that did not fit within ‘narrow definitions of record that rely on fixity and materiality’. Neurodivergent stories might not be ‘literate’ or linear in the ways that ‘well-documented’ white, neurotypical elite men’s stories often are. We thus explored several methods for finding neurodivergence in archives, from relying on catalogues with keyword searches (seeking ‘ostento’ in Spanish archives leads to several neurodiversity and disability-related texts for example) to exploring dance and theatre practice-as-research. Often we read archives, as Laura Ann Stoler writes, ‘against their grain’. Jan Pasek’s memoirs, for example, found in present-day Poland on our map, are military historical memoirs; the most recent Polish edition is published by a specialist military press. Pasek aimed to document and justify his life as a soldier and merchant: conscientious neurodiversity historiography was not his aim. However, by reading his memoirs against the grain we find–or at least can glimpse–a neurodivergent boy trapped by bear-hunters in a Lithuanian wood.

Not only did boundaries between nations move throughout the period 1550-1750, the boundaries of Europe itself shifted. The Eastern boundary moved east from the Don in the seventeenth century to rest on the Ural Mountains in the eighteenth century, leaving Russia increasingly ‘in’ but always partly ‘out’ of Europe. In the South, the border of the Ottoman Empire moved up and down Southern Italy, Greece, North Africa, and Spain from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Several European countries attempted to expand Europe into other continents through colonisation, conquest, and exploration–for example with the Dutch East Indies, or ‘New Spain’ in South, Central and North America–with oppression, death, and enslavement.  For this reason, we have not used an early modern map of Europe as the basis for our map, as this would have provided a snapshot of countries’ borders from a particular perspective and a particular point in time - or just been weird such as the German Hebraist and cartographer Sebastian Münster’s sixteenth-century map of Europe in the form of a woman. One rather creative map from early modern Europe that may be worth highlighting, though, is The Fool’s Cap Map of the World, which was created by an unknown artist circa the 1580s and frames a world map with a fool’s habit as though the globe were a jester’s face. A number of items on our map reflect the fact that “fool” and its synonyms in other languages about be used as ableist, deprecative terms for neurodivergent people. A tradition of "universal folly," however, turned typical ableism on its head and used the notion that all human beings are in some sense “foolish” to advocate for unconventional perspectives, question unfair social norms, and hold the powerful to account. Both Ayesha Ramachandran and Alison Hulme describe the map as ‘cosmopolitan’. Ramachandran identifies its cosmopolitanism as ‘the enmeshed interpenetration of fool and world’ which ‘simultaneously celebrates and deconstructs the world as icon and idea’, whilst for Hulme The Fool’s Cap Map of the World can be understood as an early modern example of “critical cosmopolitanism” – ‘a view of the world that speaks to, and challenges, power relations’. In cartography, Hulme explains, this can look like "maps that aim to expose the hidden agendas of cartography and power relations." With the lessons of The Fool’s Cap Map of the World in mind, we have used a plain geographical map without national borders. We hope this preserves both some of the familiarity and strangeness of early modern Europe.

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We also hope, that as Robert Burton wrote, this map might soothe and delight the melancholy or neurodivergent mind:

amongst all those Exercises, or recreations of the mind within doors, there is none…so fit and proper to dispel Idleness as that of Studye. To read, walke, and see Mappes, Pictures, Statues, old Coynes of Severall sorts in a fayre Gallery…it is an extraordinary delight to study, to look upon a Geographicall mappe, and to behold, as it were, all the remote Provinces, Townes, Cities of the world

 

—Robert Burton, The Anatomie of Melancholy (1621)

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