What Is Your Name? Connecting with Hugh Blair of Borgue’s Case through Verbatim Theatre

Abstract

In Chapter 4, the book’s emphasis on neurodivergent people’s relationships with early modern texts takes the form of a practice-as-research project. It describes the creativity of a group of neurodivergent people who collaboratively explored the case of the ‘autistic’ eighteenth-century laird Hugh Blair of Borgue (Blair v Blair 1747–1748) in a relaxed way as a piece of verbatim theatre. This chapter explores the power of literary-critical skills to illuminate neurodivergence in legal documents and to potentially offer some redress for the epistemic injustice perpetrated against Hugh in court. This project suggested that while literary-critical and practice-as-research methods can offer an insightful and sensitive response to texts like Blair v Blair, neurodivergent emotions and worldviews are not homogeneous. The chapter ponders what neurodivergent embodied learning might mean in an academic context and describes leaving others to hold and process their own embodied learning as a feminist act.