Disavowing Disability - Department of English

Disavowing Disability: Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation

Book Description

Disavowing Disability examines the role that disability, both as a concept and an experience, played in seventeenth-century debates about salvation and religious practice. Exploring how the use and definition of the term “disability” functioned to allocate agency and culpability, this study argues that the post-Restoration imperative to capacitate “all men”—not just the “elect”—entailed a conceptual circumscription of disability, one premised on a normative imputation of capability. The work of Richard Baxter, sometimes considered a harbinger of ‘modernity’ and one of the most influential divines of the Long Eighteenth Century, elucidates this multifarious process of enabling. In constructing an ideology of ability that imposed moral self-determination, Baxter encountered a germinal form of the “problem” of disability in liberal theory. While a strategy of “inclusionism” served to assimilate most manifestations of alterity, melancholy presented an intractability that frustrated the logic of rehabilitation in fatal ways.

This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Alison Searle

Church History & Religious Culture 102.3-4, 569-571

This excellent short study demonstrates the intellectual and cultural value of taking both early modern British theology—here the writings of the puritan, Richard Baxter—seriously and negotiating the potential pitfalls of presentism that drawing it into dialogue with contemporary theoretical approaches, in this case, disability studies proffers …. There is nothing lumbering about the seven tightly organised sections of Disavowing Disability. McKendry invites us to remap the often forgotten or suppressed theological genealogies that have shaped the ableism of liberal theory and to rethink Baxter’s extensive and influential oeuvre through the lens of disability studies and its critique of ‘natural ability.’ … The significance of this book lies in its seemingly effortless but deeply rigorous interdisciplinarity and lightly worn erudition …. The virtue of McKendry’s account is its astute combination of the tools of theology with literary criticism and disability studies …. It illuminates the contours of Baxter’s enormous theological project in connection with his life (and how he narrates it) and demonstrates in a fresh and generative way how Baxter acted as a key mediator and innovator of theological models that continue to shape ableist assumptions of the individual subject within secular, liberal theories of the self.

Margaret Sönser Breen

Bunyan Studies 26, 124-130

Disavowing Disability proves an enjoyable and provocative study. To this reviewer’s delight, McKendry’s argument is propelled forward at various stages by questions illuminating the significations and contexts of disability with regard to seventeenth-century religious writings, Baxter’s in particular. In the process, not only experienced researchers but also graduate students, and even advanced undergraduate students, are reminded – and taught – how to identify and think through key issues and distinctions. Incisive, erudite, and highly readable, this Element puts scholars of seventeenth-century religious history, disability studies, queer studies, and feminist studies in conversation with one another. As such, it proves a fine example of what McKendry terms ‘alliance building’ (2) and a testament to the intellectual rewards of crossdisciplinary work.

Maura Brady

Reformation 27.2, 145-147

In Disavowing Disability he has written a fresh, engaging, and exciting work that breaks new ground at an important intersection between disability and religion, a volume that will be required reading for scholars in these fields.