NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium: Making the Measures of Man: “Disability” in Milton, Bunyan, and the Long Eighteenth Century （Andrew McKendry）

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Title	NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium: Making the Measures of Man: “Disability” in Milton, Bunyan, and the Long Eighteenth Century （Andrew McKendry）
Office	College of Liberal Arts--Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures
TIME	2026/10/1 上午 10:42:50
Content	臺大外文系學術演講 NTU DFLL Faculty Colloquium Title: Making the Measures of Man: “Disability” in Milton, Bunyan, and the Long Eighteenth Century Speaker: Dr. Andrew McKendry （Nord University） Moderator: Dr. Manuel Herrero-Puertas曼紐爾副教授（National Taiwan University） Time: 15:30-17:00, October 21, 2026 Venue: B208, Humanities Hall, NTU （臺大人文館B208室） Abstract: When, after roughly three years of discussions and drafting, the authors of the Westminster Confession of Faith declared that every person is “utterly indisposed, [and] disabled,” they were hardly reaching for that old chestnut of Disability Studies, ‘we are all disabled.’ Yet, the age-defining theology articulated so decisively in 1647 does challenge any simplistic appeal to a ‘moral model’ for Christianity； until well into the eighteenth century, religious writing regularly presented conditions such as blindness, ‘lameness,’ and even ‘idiocy’ as the defining features of ‘natural’ man. All those Biblical stories about the blind and withered? They are about you, readers and churchgoers were told in so many words. This talk examines the implications of such a worldview in the writings of John Milton and John Bunyan, exploring what their treatment of disability reveals about the potentialities and limitations of this theological framework. The subsequent repudiation and decline of this Calvinistic worldview throughout the eighteenth century entailed a denigration of disability that remains with us today； as visions of justice, both heavenly and earthly, came to hinge increasingly on normative conceptions of natural ability, persons with disabilities served less to define than to differentiate, functioning as exceptions and boundaries demarcating the power and status of the “ordinary” person.　 Speaker Bio: Andrew McKendry is Associate Professor of English Literature at Nord University, Norway, where he leads the Humanities, Education & Culture Research Group. He specializes in the historical relationship between religion and disability, and he is author of Disavowing Disability: Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation （Cambridge University Press, 2021）. His work has appeared in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Studies and Studies in Romanticism, as well as in edited collections including Mary Wollstonecraft in Context （Cambridge University Press, 2020）, Global Bunyan and Visual Art （Bloomsbury, 2025）, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Disability and Literatures in English, 1700–1900 （Oxford University Press, 2027）.
Fee	Free
Active Date	2026/10/21
Active Place	B208, Humanities Building, NTU
Contact	洪啟明
Tel	02-33663208
EMail	qiming1234@ntu.edu.tw
Reader	Faculty/Staff, Student, Alumni, Others

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