Historical Neurodiversity and British Studies
- Bradley Irish
- 5 hours ago
- 7 min read
In the last decade or so, scholars of British Studies have been developing an exciting new theoretical method: analyzing British history, literature, society and culture through the lens of human neurological diversity, or neurodiversity. Emerging from disability studies, a neurodiversity-informed approach offers new avenues for exploring marginalized social identities, as well as the subjective experience of real and fictional figures more generally. In this piece, I’d like to reflect on how we can utilize neurodiversity theory to enrich our work in British studies, with a special emphasis on how we can explore neurological diversity in historically distant periods.
Neurodiversity is a concept that refers to the fact that human minds, and the bodies with which they are entwined, naturally vary in their neurological functioning; that is to say, there are many different ways that people do things like think, feel, sense, and generally engage the world around them and others who inhabit it. The concept we now understand as neurodiversity originated in online autism activist communities during the 1990s. At the end of that decade, scholars began to build on this foundation and in the last thirty years, a growing body of scholarly research, across both the sciences and humanities, has come to focus on understanding the countless aspects (and implications) of human neurological diversity.
The existence of neurodiversity is an empirical fact about the human population—just like biodiversity is an empirical fact about our world at large. To speak of it, then, should theoretically only be to speak about a value-neutral, uncontroversial aspect of how our species exists in the world. The problem, however, comes with how that biological fact more practically accrues social meaning. That’s because particular cultural and historical contexts inevitably come to understand more common neurological styles as the supposedly normal, natural, and healthy ways of human functioning—with the consequence that people whose neurological being diverges from this alleged standard get pathologized and marginalized as abnormal, unnatural, unhealthy, or just otherwise weird or “off.”
You’re probably familiar with certain kinds of these neurological styles, designated by medical label such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, or OCD. (I, for example, identify as both an autistic person and a person with ADHD). But while these forms of neurodivergence may take their name from a medicalized framework, scholars and activists of neurodiversity, and neurodivergent people in general, stress that we need not understand our native way of neurological being through the pathologizing and diagnostic medical paradigm, which often positions us as sick people in need of a “cure.” Instead, we can embrace our manner of inhabiting the world as every bit as natural and authentically human as anyone else’s. To be sure, it’s not that we eschew diagnostic labels altogether—as I mentioned, I openly identity as autistic—but rather that I understand autistic as a value-neutral (or even positive) term that describes my entire manner of subjective being, shaping everything about how I exist in the world, instead of as a clinical designation that coldly identifies some “condition” or “disorder” that I “have.”
At the same time, it is certainly true that many (though not all) forms of neurodivergence are disabling—and indeed, as noted above, neurodiversity studies emerged out of both disability scholarship and disability activism. But again, the emphasis is on helping neurodivergent people thrive in an ableist, neurotypical world that does not accommodate their natural way of being human, rather than casting them as medically defective.
In the last decade or so scholars in the humanities have increasingly begun to theorize how we might think about neurodivergence, and neurological difference more generally, in the historical past. I’m a scholar of early modern English literature and culture, and early modern neurodiversity studies has even emerged as discrete subfield—though researchers have begun to look at neurodiversity across the scope of British history. I’d like to describe three different ways that scholars might look at historical neurodiversity, to give you a sense of how we’re beginning to analyze neurological being in the past.
The first approach, which is the most traditionally historicist, is to explore neurodivergence as it was natively understood in a particular historical context. This entails examining forms of being that were understood to diverge from normative neurological standards in their own historical moment. In early modern neurodiversity studies, for example, scholars have interrogated how categories like fool, madman, lunatic, and melancholic were constructed in 16th and 17th century England. Both historians and literary scholars, for example, have considered the discourse of foolishness in the period; fool was an extremely complex, multifaceted category in early modern England, with various legal, political, and social implications. What conceptually unites different kinds of fools, however, was the basic understanding that they had an atypical quality of mind, whether it be because of (what we’d now call) intellectual disability, or because of a prodigious “wit.” There is a wealth of contemporary evidence to explore. For example, the comedian Robert Armin, who played several fools in Shakespeare’s plays, wrote a book called Foole upon Foole, or Six Sortes of Sottes (first published in 1600), which offered biographical snapshots of individuals said to embody particular kinds of foolishness (“A flat foole, a leane foole, a merry foole, a fatt foole, a cleane foole, a verrie foole”).
The second approach is to eschew labels and categories all together, and just consider more broadly how different historical minds and different historical ways of being diverged from each other, contributing uniquely in their own individualized way to the infinite spectrum of human neurological diversity. Whether we look at literary characters or historical figures, we can be generally sensitive to how individuals vary in their precise manner of cognitive, emotional, and sensory functioning. This approach can help us think more carefully about how different forms of subjectivity have historically existed. Neurodiversity scholar Laura Seymour, for example, has explored the eccentric Scottish laird Hugh Blair of Borgue (1708–1765) in this manner. While a previous generation of scholars was quick to assert that Blair was probably autistic, Seymour shows how a more general neurodiversity pride perspective can help us engage his uniqueness in a way that avoids modern diagnostic labeling, and instead recognizes and celebrates how his subjectivity diverged from that of his contemporaries.
The final, and in some ways most intriguing, approach is to investigate historical difference through the lens of modern neurodivergence categories. This approach looks in the past for forms of being that resemble the neurological styles that we now know as autism, or ADHD, etc. This, to be sure, is the most methodologically complicated, because it risks both anachronism and the theoretically unsound practice of retrospective diagnosis, things most neurodiversity scholars wisely try to avoid. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t an intellectually and ethically defensible way to consider the historical past through what we now know about neurodivergence. Rather than vulgarly “diagnosing” a historical subject (real or fictional) with an anachronistic neurological label, instead this approach explores how their historically-situated way of being anticipates, resembles, resonates with, or is analogous to forms of neurodivergence that we now understand to exist in the 21st century. So, rather than understanding autism as an essentialist, biological condition that a historical figure did or did not “have,” we instead understand it as a non-essentialist, conceptual category clustering certain fuzzy, roughly-analogous ways of being—a category that a historical figure might be tentatively thought to somehow intersect with, without making any claim about how their mind objectively worked. We might, for example, float the possibility that there was something autistic-like about how King James I seemed to interact socially with others—but this is a world apart from irresponsibly declaring “James I was autistic.” This third manner of exploring neurodiversity is particularly exciting because it helps underscore the fact that there have always been individuals whose way of being in the world resembles that of individuals who now self-identify as autistic, and that the past was full of people who would likely have understood themselves to be autistic if that label was chronologically available to them. This helps legitimize 21st century neurodivergent scholars and students by creating a historical genealogy of neurological difference, a vital reminder that the human species has always been, and will always continue to be, neurologically diverse.
These modes reflect three central ways that scholars have begun to understand historical neurodiversity—but I must conclude with a final point, about the larger implications of this analysis. For good reason, neurodiversity studies (historical or otherwise) tends to center the interests of neurodivergent people, because neurodivergent people are a population that faces, and has historically faced, marginalization, discrimination, and even violence. But while neurodivergent people must remain prioritized in historical neurodiversity studies, there is a larger sense that all individuals, no matter how common or uncommon their neurological style, uniquely contribute to the infinite spectrum of human neurological diversity. Thus, all study of cognition, emotion, and sensation contributes to our understanding of historical neurodiversity, and could be rightly considered a contribution to neurodiversity studies. Just as one need not belong to a minority identity group to have a racial identity (or a gender identity, or a sexual identity) one need not be neurodivergent to have a neurological identity. All humans, whether neurotypical or neurodivergent, have styles of experiencing cognition, emotion, and sensation that crucially shape how they subjectively inhabit the world. For this reason, neurodiversity is the next frontier for studying human subjectivity at large—and it has much to offer to the future of British Studies.
Bradley J. Irish is a Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he studies the literature and culture of early modern England. Much of his research has focused on the history of emotion, and he is now working in the interdisciplinary field of neurodiversity studies. He is the author of 5 monographs, including Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions (Palgrave, 2025).
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