New Acquisition: Seminal Work on Deaf Education in 17th Century Spain
Few written works display the formalization of a nascent language as the book by Juan Pablo Bonet: Reduction of the Letters of the Alphabet and Method of Teaching Deaf-Mutes to Speak, 1620. Bonet was the first to publish not only a method of instruction of the Deaf but, more importantly, the use of a fingerspelling system that continues in use today.
The history of deaf education begins in Spain, for the teaching of deaf children is widely seen as having originated there and led to instruction throughout the world. By the 16th century, Spain had become a wealthy nation and its nobility had chosen to retain power through marriage within its ruling class. This consanguineous marriage over time created a genetic disposition for deaf offspring. They were desperate for a cure for their children and looked to the Church, especially local Benedictine monks, for assistance.
In the centuries preceding Bonet’s work, perspectives on deafness were framed by the philosopher Aristotle, whose work was venerated throughout the Middle Ages. He asserted that those born deaf were inevitably mute and likened deaf people to animals, capable of vocal sounds but not of thoughts. Speech flowed from the soul, animals had no soul, and speech was absent in both animals and deaf people. The intellectual implications for deaf persons who were mute were obvious.
The views of the Church held no hope for deaf people either. The apostle Paul had written that “faith cometh by hearing,” and according to Saint Augustine, deafness “hinders faith itself.” These statements were taken to mean that deaf people could not be taught the Word of God, and once again the implications for deaf people were horrendous in a culture dominated by the Church in daily life.
In a society that believed them to be outside the realm of both learning and salvation, deaf people who could not speak held no legal standing. The law had long distinguished between deaf-mutes and those deaf by accident; that is, deaf people who could talk. Only the latter were recognized as persons by law. Deaf-mutes, in contrast, were routinely classified the mentally defective and the insane. In the thirteenth century the Spanish king Alfonso X had denied them the right to bear witness, to make a will, or to inherit a feudal estate.
Spelling on the fingers, like the technique of using sound-letter correspondences to teach reading, was an innovation for the hand alphabet. In 1593, Fray Melchor Yebra’s Refugium infirmorum used alphabetically ordered paragraphs accompanied by woodcuttings of the appropriate hand positions to represent each letter from A to Z. But it was intended solely to comfort the sick and dying, and the author recommended use of the finger alphabet to facilitate communication with those whose illness had rendered them unable to speak.
When a Benedictine tutor was summoned to the Court of the powerful Velasco family, Juan Pablo Bonet of Aragon (c.1573–1633) was residing in the Velasco household where several deaf noble offspring lived. An ambitious man of the world involved in politics and the military, Bonet had begun his career under Spain’s captain general of artillery, doing battle with the Barbary pirates and in Italy and Savoy, then serving as secretary to the captain general of Oran. Bonet was a man of letters, a scholar of classical languages, as well as French and Italian. In 1607 he had been named secretary to Juan de Velasco, the sixth constable of Castile, and some five years later he had accompanied his employer on a mission to Milan, serving him as both secretary and captain of artillery. After the constable’s death in 1613, Bonet had stayed on in the service of his son and successor, Bernardino, who was but four years old at the time. He had no experience teaching or working with deaf children.
Reduction de las letras y arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos was dedicated to Philip III, and it contained among its introductory pages a poem by Lope de Vega Carpio praising the author’s “divine inventiveness.”
In the first part of the book, Reduction de las letras, Bonet wrote that children learning to read should not be taught the names of the letters, but instead, the sounds associated with them. He also advocated the same procedure to teach deaf people to speak. This was a phonic method that Bonet implied that he had invented but no doubt had lifted from the Benedictine tutor.
In addition to the discussion about teaching reading, the Reduction de las letras also contained many curious and farfetched observations about the nature of the letters. For instance, the author argued that the form of each letter was itself suggestive of its pronunciation. Thus, the letter A, he maintained, when laid on its side, suggested the wide-open position of the mouth, and the line that crosses it indicated that the mouth was to remain open during its articulation; the letter B, with its two semi-circles joined in the center, suggested the closed position assumed by the lips to produce it; and so on.
In the second part of the book, Arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos, Bonet identified deafness as the “first and most general” cause of muteness. “Since to speak is the same as to imitate what one has heard,” he asserted, “it follows that whoever cannot hear will not be able to speak, even though the instrument of the tongue may be agile, loose, and free to perform the movement used in the pronunciation of words” (p. 109–110). The work contained a method for instructing deaf students, along with an essay on how to formulate an indecipherable code and decipher coded messages, and a treatise on Greek. Also included was an explanation of how to apply the principles of the Arte to teach mutes of other nations, since muteness was, in this writer’s words, “a common illness” (p. 249).
Bonet’s identification of deafness as the most common cause of muteness constituted an advance in existing opinions. His view of muteness was negative, for he contended that it impeded “the manifestation of the rational soul” — a belief that speech came from the soul and was the sole source of reason. Consequently, mutes “lose their standing as men before others, being left so unfit for communication that it seems they serve as no more than piteous monsters of nature, which imitate our form” (p. 26). It is doubtful that Benedictines, living in a monastery where verbal communication was limited and sign language was used regularly to communicate, would have shared such uninformed views about muteness.
As a matter of morality, Bonet rejected the harsh and futile methods deaf people were subjected to in his day, procedures such as “taking the mutes to the countryside, and in valleys where the voice has greater sonority, to make them give loud shouts, and with such violence that they came to bleed from the mouth, putting them also in buckets where the voice reverberated loudly, and they could hear it amplified.” Dismissing such tactics as “very violent and not at all appropriate” (p. 111), he advocated instead a different approach to the teaching of speech, one in which the sense of sight would compensate for the lack of hearing. He reasoned that knowledge of articulation could be acquired visually, and in that way the deaf person might be taught to speak.
Bonet’s approach was highly methodical, with the complexity of the material increasing gradually. After the student learned to pronounce individual sounds –first the vowels, then the consonants– he progressed to syllables, then simple words referring to concrete objects present in the room. Next, he learned to read aloud from a printed text; comprehension was not deemed important at this point but would come later. The tenses were reduced to three: past, present, and future. The parts of speech were also reduced to three: noun, verb, and conjunction. Concrete nouns were taught by directly associating the word with the referent; abstract nouns were taught by “demonstrative actions,” which Bonet declined to describe, “leaving this to the teachers’ good judgment and discretion” (p. 146). Action verbs (e.g., run, walk, laugh) were likewise to be acted out. The “passions of the soul,” however, like love, hate, jealousy, contrition, anger, cruelty, and so on, were not to be taught by demonstration. Instead, the teacher was to wait until the pupil found himself in the throes of one of these emotions, then supply its name. These passions might be provoked in the learner for pedagogical purposes, but in so doing, Bonet cautioned, care should be taken not to lead him to sin.
After publishing his book in 1620, Juan Pablo Bonet showed no more interest in deaf education. He dedicated the remainder of his life to politics and died in Madrid in 1633. Thanks to Bonet’s book, this one-handed alphabet would eventually spread to Paris, the cradle of unfettered sign language development, and throughout continental Europe and the Americas, where its use among deaf people continues to this day.
Juan Pablo Bonet. Reduction de las letras y arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos. Madrid: Francisco Abarca de Angulo. 1620.
4to, vellum [26], 308, [6] p., [8] engravings by Diego de Astor, [1] leave engraving folded.
The renown Spanish paper conservator, Pablo Anton, is cited as having washed the engravings and repaired torn pages. When rebound, lower margin and folded engraving had some text loss. Modern binding on limp vellum with author and title handwritten on spine.
Provenance: Unidentified collector in Madrid purchased this copy from the bookseller, Enrique Montero. No ex libris or owner signatures. UO Special Collections purchase from Elena Gallego Rare Books, Madrid, July 2021.
Francisco Abarca de Angelo established a print house in Madrid in 1619. At that time, Madrid had fourteen printing houses in operation. According to an extent contract with the author Fray Antonio de Remesal, Abarca acquired his “Vatican” capital fonts in June 1619. These fonts are used throughout the Bonet. His printing house ceased operation in 1630. The engraver, Diego de Astor (1588-1636), lived in Toledo. He engraved in copper and cut dies. In 1609, he was appointed engraver to the Mint of Segovia.
References
Cruikshank, D.W. Italian Type in Spain and the Spanish Empire in the Seventeenth Century. (in) Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1986.
Plann, Susan. A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain, 1550-1835. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft338nb1x6/
~ David de Lorenzo
