The cultural links between sex, sin, and disability in post-Reformation England were complex and evolving. The dissolution of the monasteries, where care for the sick and disabled had traditionally been provided, caused a sharp increase in public anxiety about disability. There was a fear of vagrancy and that ‘pore impotent creatures’ who used to have ‘hospitals, and almeshouses to be lodged in’ would now ‘lye and storue in the stretes’. The accompanying fear that ‘sturdy’, that is, non-disabled, beggars would pose as the former charges of monasteries in order to extort alms from charitable people, was fuelled by more widespread suspicion that all apparent cripples were liars and conmen, or even, as the surgeon Ambrose Pare claimed, that they were forcibly maiming and disfiguring children in their care in order to use them for begging to obtain ‘the more reliefe’ in the form of alms money. These developments took place against a backdrop of vast religious changes in England that had an inevitable effect on concepts of sin, accompanied by the interplay of the persistent aesthetic of the grotesque and the emerging science of anatomy. Here I employ a range of private and public texts, including the sermons of the little-researched Calvinist cleric Thomas Adams, to investigate the ways in which religion, science, and the grotesque aesthetic interacted to form attitudes to disabled sexuality in early modern England. I suggest that the manifestations of these attitudes in the literature of the time, specifically in Books III and IV of Spenser's Faerie Queene and in Shakespeare's Richard III, demonstrate the emerging tension between the idealised and the variant body and their relative associations with sexual desire.

The word ‘disabled’ occurs infrequently in early modern English, for example in Shakespeare's sonnet 66, ‘strength by limping sway disabled’, and in the 1622 play Herod and Antipater, where injuries sustained when jumping from a building result in the immediate question ‘by what meanes comes she thus disabled?’ The early modern usage does not map directly onto a modern definition. In these examples and elsewhere it carries implications of a removal from one's function or role in life, much as it may be used of objects today.