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Andrew McKendry, Disavowing Disability: Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 80 pp. £17/$22 US pb; open access on Cambridge Core.
Andrew McKendry's Disavowing Disability: Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation is a compelling read. Part of Cambridge University Press's Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series, it offers a concise study of the divine's writings at the intersection of soteriology and disability. Shaped by methodologies such as Marxism and feminism, disability studies has generally overlooked seventeenthcentury religion's engagement with questions of ability and disability, and inclusion and exclusion, with regard to matters of salvation, righteousness, and community. Clearly and convincingly, in just eighty pages and seven compact chapters, McKendry demonstrates Baxter's relevance. With interests that ranged across theology, political theory, philosophy, and literature, Baxter (1615-1691) proves a key contributor to a 'prehistory of modern disability' (2). Simultaneously inclusive and ableist, his vision of salvation both recognized the faithful's 'variability and vulnerability' and presumed the need for their regulation (4); problematically, that vision depended on an assumption of 'compulsory able-bodiedness' (15, 17).
Seventeenth-century religious texts 'abound with disability' (1), and their study affords twenty-first-century scholars the opportunity to distinguish disability's meanings in that earlier time from those of the present day. To illustrate the point, McKendry begins Disavowing Disability with a discussion of The Pilgrim 's Progress. In Part 1 of The Pilgrim's Progress, Christian escapes Giant Despair's dungeon in which he is locked by discovering the key of hope. In Part 2, it is Great-Heart who slays Despair, while, as McKendry points out, it is those pilgrims challenged by gender, age, or physical or mental impairment - among them, Christiana, her sons, companion Mercy, and such fellow travellers as 'Ready-to-halt' and 'Feeblemind' - who 'protect the reader from despair' (1), with the assurance that spiritual disability is a precondition of salvation. As McKendry observes, the disabilities of Bunyan's pilgrims are 'allegorical', linked to 'divine rather than social justice' (2). Of course, that connection did not prevent later readers - Charlotte Brontě among them - from recognizing the importance of scrutinizing the question of weakness - particularly with regard to gender - from the perspective of social justice. McKendry does not pursue this line of inquiry. Nor does he mention the...