SRC invites papers for an SRC-sponsored panel at the 2026 Sixteenth Century Society Conference, to be held from October 29-31 in Chicago, Illinois.
Changeling stories are disability narratives. In traditional folklore across pre-modern Europe, families seemingly believed that small children, often babies, who exhibited non-typical behavior (muteness, excessive eating, howling), or non-typical appearance (large eyes, broad heads, malformed skulls), were not their biological children but fairies (or sometimes dwarfs), who had been placed there by a supernatural being who stole their actual child. While this folk tradition is complex, nuanced, and varies across cultures, its function is fairly easily explained; it provides an explanation for disability, hope for a “cure,” since the tradition provided remedies to expel the changeling and return the human child, and, more grimly, an excuse for infanticide. Many authorities recommended simply killing the changeling.
How does the origin and function of the changeling narrative impact our understanding of its deployment in early modern imaginative literature? Can we use the tools and methodology of disability studies to investigate the appearance of the changeling figure in, for instance, The Faerie Queene and A Midsummer Night’s Dream? What about the metaphorical references to the folktale in plays such as 1 Henry IV and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling? Do texts, such as Jonson’s masques and Spenser’s poetry, which rely on the larger framework of fairy mythology, imply the same ableist logic as the changeling myth? Can we view stories of hidden parentage, for instance Sidney’s Arcadia, as an extension of the changeling story?
We invite any papers that apply disability theory to these and other uses of the changeling narrative. If interested, please contact or send abstract and short bio to edunnum@campbell.edu by April 12.