Chapter 2
Out of the Monastery
The Seventeenth Century

In any home where there are mutes ... it is not well that those who talk to him use signs, nor that they permit him to make use of them.
—Juan Pablo Bonet

Sire, Your Highness will forgive me, but I cannot tell you, because I gave the teacher my word that I would keep his secret.
—Bernardino de Velasco

He did not need to speak in order to govern his estates, [for] the majesty of his judgment and talent put everything in order.
—F. Llamas y Aguilar

Pedro Ponce lived and taught in a silent, signing monastery but trained no successor, and after his death the teaching of deaf people in Spain seems to have been interrupted for a time.^[1] Recorded instances of their instruction surface once again, however, early in the seventeenth century. At this point the teaching was no longer solely in the hands of members of religious orders, and the students, while still from aristocratic families, could now be found living outside the monastery. Yet each tutor continued to have only a small number of students to whom he devoted an extraordinary amount of time and effort. The results thus obtained were excellent—it could hardly be otherwise, given these conditions. But when the teaching moved beyond the monastery walls, the methodology changed considerably. Deaf students came to be instructed by methods originally devised for the hearing, and

the tenets of oralism, which would prohibit deaf people from signing and oblige them to speak, were clearly set out for the first time in a book on their instruction, the first known published work on the topic. Educated deaf aristocrats entered the public arena, rising to positions of great visibility and importance at home and abroad; by their example, which could hardly have passed unnoticed, they contributed to the growing awareness that deaf people could be educated, and assume their rightful place in society.

Alonso Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa, the fifth marquis of Priego, was born in 1588, four years after the passing of Pedro Ponce. He was deaf from birth. Deafness was no stranger to Don Alonso's family, for in keeping with the practice of the Spanish aristocracy, the family had often opted for consanguineous marriages.^[2] Alonso's mother, Juana Enríquez de Rivera y Cortés, granddaughter of the famous explorer Hernán Cortés, was a cousin of the deaf Velasco brothers taught by Pedro Ponce; his father, Pedro Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa, fourth marquis of Priego, had been born of a marriage between uncle and niece that had also produced a deaf daughter, Alonso's aunt, Ana Ponce de León.^[3] And Don Alonso had a deaf sister as well, Ana Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa. All these deaf relatives had been sent to the convent, but in a break with this tradition, the deaf marquis would be educated at his home in Montilla, in Seville.^[4] Upon his father's death in August 1606, Don Alonso succeeded him to become the fifth marquis of Priego, third marquis of Villafranca, and second marquis of Montalbán. The young nobleman was eighteen years old. The following February he wed his first cousin, Juana Enríquez de Rivera y Girón, and in December of that same year they celebrated the birth of their first child.^[5] Eventually there would be seventeen more—none of them deaf.^[6]

At some point in Don Alonso's youth, there arrived at Montilla a tutor, one Manuel Ramírez de Carrión.^[7] De Carrión had been born in Murcia, in the village of Hellín, where he had most likely been a teacher, and there he had taught his first deaf student.^[8] Upon arriving at the palace at Montilla, he set about instructing his new pupil.

Don Alonso's lessons were interrupted around 1615, according to de Carrión "at the best age," when the tutor was summoned to Madrid by Juana de Córdoba, duchess of Frías, widow of the sixth constable of Castile and mother of the seventh.^[9] The duchess had a deaf son, Luis Fernández de Velasco, for whom she needed a teacher.^[10] As one member

of the household would later relate, the boy's mother took "immense care" to find "possible remedies to overcome this defect, looking for people and spending liberal sums, so that such a great lord might not be left without a cure."^[11] The child was none other than the grandnephew of Francisco and Pedro de Velasco, the deaf aristocrats who had been taught by Pedro Ponce at the monastery at Oña. Francisco and Pedro's hearing brother, Iñigo, had been the fifth constable of Castile; his son Juan, the sixth constable, was the father of Bernardino, the hearing elder son destined to become the seventh constable, and Luis, the deaf second son, for whom the duchess of Frías was now desperately seeking a teacher.^[12] The families of both pupils were related, for while Luis de Velasco was Francisco and Pedro de Velasco's grandnephew, Alonso Fernández de Córdoba's mother, Juana Enríquez de Rivera, was their cousin—making Alonso's mother and Luis first cousins twice removed, and Luis and Alonso second cousins once removed. Thus, the duchess was surely aware that Ramírez de Carrión was educating her deaf relative Alonso Fernández de Córdoba at Montilla.

The marquis of Priego was at first reluctant to allow his teacher to depart. His instruction was incomplete; moreover, the young nobleman was no doubt somewhat dependent on his tutor to administer his estates. His initial unwillingness was overcome, however, when the duchess of Frías enlisted the support of powerful allies such as the archbishop of Burgos, the president of Castile, and the count of Salazar.^[13] So it was finally agreed that de Carrión would go to Madrid to teach Luis de Velasco, but only for a limited period, after which he would return to the marquis of Priego at Montilla.

At the Spanish court, Ramírez de Carrión undertook the instruction of young Luis, who was then around five years of age, and at the same time he also taught the boy's hearing brother, Bernardino, the seventh constable of Castile, who was one year Luis's senior.^[14] De Carrión would remain at the duchess of Frías's home for some four years, journeying to Montilla only occasionally during this period.

Unlike his predecessor Pedro Ponce, de Carrión had lived all his life in the hearing world. His deaf students too were on hearing turf, de Carrión's turf. The tutor, it will be remembered, had in all probability been a schoolteacher before turning to deaf education, and from what can be pieced together, the pedagogy he employed with deaf children was much like that he had used with the hearing. One technique consisted of teaching reading by reducing the name of each letter to the sound associated with it. The letter s, for instance, which in Spanish is called

ese, would be designated simply as sss, the letter m, eme in Spanish, would be designated as mmm. This phonic approach was intended to facilitate the next step, joining the sounds together to form syllables and words, and Ramírez de Carrión utilized this technique with Luis's hearing brother, as well as his deaf pupils. The tutor would boast some years later that with his method, in but a short time, "a child can learn to read aloud without faltering ... as perfectly as if he had studied for two years with the method commonly taught in the schools." As proof of his claim, de Carrión continued, "I shall give a highly visible example of this, and I could mention many. In Madrid, when he was six years old, I taught the constable of Castile, who is alive today, to read in thirteen days, with such success that he needed no additional teaching other than practice in order to read fluently. His Excellency Our Lord the King attested to it when His Majesty wished to hear the marquis of Fresno [young Luis Velasco] read and speak in my presence, such inventiveness being accredited and the inventor honored in the presence of such a great monarch."^[15]

De Carrión had no more to say about his reading method, and for an account of the particulars we must turn to Juan Bautista de Morales, a publisher, and his brother Cristóbal, a schoolteacher. The two became acquainted with de Carrión at Montilla when he was called there to teach the marquis of Priego. Sometime after Cristóbal Bautista's death, Juan found among his brother's papers an account of how to teach reading by reducing the names of the letters to the sound they represent, then linking them to produce syllables and words. This technique Cristóbal said he had learned from Ramírez de Carrión. By 1618 Juan Bautista had prepared for publication a book that included his brother's materials;^[16] his Pronunciaciones generales de lenguas appeared five years later.^[17]

De Carrión claimed to have invented the reading method he employed, and the Bautista brothers attributed to him the technique of teaching the sounds the letters stood for, rather than their names. In reality, however, the idea was not new, for already more than one hundred years earlier the Spanish grammarian Antonio Nebrija had advocated designating the letters by their sounds, and by the early seventeenth century this approach was fairly widespread.^[18] Contrary to what de Carrión claimed, then, he was not the inventor of this approach but may have been the first to teach deaf youngsters as if they were hearing.

Another tool in de Carrión's bag of tricks was the manual alphabet. Once again the evidence is provided by Juan Bautista's book, which

Figure 3.
The Spanish manual alphabet. From Juan Manuel Ballesteros,
Manual de sordo-mudos y que puede servir para los que oyen y hablan
(Madrid: Colegio de Sordomudos, 1836). Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

contained a chapter on "the letters [formed] by the hand in order to speak and make oneself understood mainly with mutes and the deaf." With this finger alphabet, Bautista explained, de Carrión "teaches mutes to write, read, understand, and speak, with such accurate pronunciation, [it is] as if they had studied and learned many languages."^[19]

Spelling on the fingers, like the technique of using sound-letter correspondences to teach reading, was hardly an innovation, for the hand alphabet described by Bautista was essentially the same one published in 1593 in Fray Melchor Yebra's Refugium infirmorum .^[20] The book, with alphabetically ordered paragraphs accompanied by woodcuttings of the appropriate hand positions to represent each letter from A to Z, was intended 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, as well as to enable confessors to communicate with deaf people.^[21]

Yebra may have been the first to publish the manual alphabet in Spain, but he was not its inventor, for systems using the hands and parts of the body to represent numbers and letters have been attested as far back as

Greek and Roman antiquity.^[22] Yebra stated that the alphabet he advocated was commonly employed, and he suggested an additional use for it, namely, "to console other deaf people" (the reference here was to sordos, deaf people who could talk, and not to mudos, those who were also mute). Yebra added that some of these individuals, "compelled by necessity," had already mastered the hand alphabet "in order to deal with and communicate with people."^[23]

Manuel Ramírez de Carrión made use of the manual alphabet, then, in teaching his deaf pupils—we have it on the word of the Bautista brothers—and most likely he relied on a phonic approach to teach them pronunciation and reading. But we have no direct knowledge of how he went about instructing deaf students, for he left no written record of his methods. Instead, there has come down to us only an account of his penchant for secrecy. Upon relating "a reply the constable gave to His Majesty when he was a prince," Ramírez explained:

The first day I was to begin the lessons of the marquis of Fresno [Luis de Velasco], since he was so young he was not yet eight years old, he refused to go in alone with me for the lesson, and asked that his brother the constable attend. That was what was done, and before beginning I asked the constable to give me his word as a gentleman that he would reveal to no one the secret of that teaching. His Excellency promised me, and he kept his word so well, that one day when His Highness asked him whether his brother could speak yet, he answered affirmatively. And when asked who was teaching him, he gave the teacher's name. And when asked if he had seen him give a lesson, he again said yes. And when he came to ask him how he taught him, he replied with great integrity, "Sire, Your Highness will forgive me, but I cannot tell you, because I gave the teacher my word that I would keep his secret." His Highness esteemed and praised such a discreet reply, and the count of Medellín, who was also present, said: "Sire, one who knows so well how to keep a secret and fulfill his promise as a child, will know even better how to keep those Your Highness may entrust to him when he is older." Since in truth the constable was not then more than nine years old.^[24]

De Carrión must have been delighted at Bernardino's refusal to divulge his techniques, for he deemed his circumspect response "worthy of being written in marble and bronze and dedicated to immortality." This was not exactly the age of altruism, and the secrecy in which he shrouded his methods allowed de Carrión to protect his livelihood.

Despite the measures de Carrión took to conceal his procedures, and despite Bernardino's discretion, one man in particular seems to have made it his business to learn a great deal about the master's methods.

When the tutor was summoned from Montilla, the Aragonese Juan Pablo Bonet, secretary to young Constable Bernardino, was residing in the Velasco household.^[25] An ambitious man of the world inclined toward 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, in Algeria, where he became friends with Lope de Vega Carpio, the most celebrated playwright of Spain's golden age. Bonet was also a man of letters, a scholar of classical languages, as well as French and Italian, and an author of mediocre verse.^[26] 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.

When Ramírez de Carrión went to Madrid in 1615, summoned by the duchess of Frías, the tutor and the warrior-turned-secretary found themselves living under the same roof. After some four years, however, the leave granted de Carrión by the marquis of Priego expired, and the teacher returned to his pupil at Montilla. Young Luis's education was incomplete, and the duchess once again searched for a teacher for her son. Various individuals attempted to continue his training, among them Juan Pablo Bonet. (Bonet would later recount that he had been moved to his efforts as much by love and obligation to the house of the constable as by the duchess's enormous and heartfelt endeavors on her son's behalf).^[27] But the secretary seemed an unlikely choice, for his experience in deaf education up to that point had apparently consisted solely of observing what he could of Ramírez de Carrión's procedures—procedures Ramírez did his best to conceal. Thus, it is not surprising that Luis's new tutor met with no success.^[28]

This failure deterred the loyal employee neither from composing a book on the subject—the first published work of its kind—nor from professing to have been Luis's teacher, nor from intimating that he was the inventor of the art of teaching deaf people, claiming to have found at last a "secret path by which to enter and a smooth road by which to depart."^[29] Bonet stopped short of asserting that no one else had previously instructed a deaf person, saying only that "the ancient sages and modern philosophers, extremely scrupulous scrutinizers of nature and its admirable effects, who expended so much time and effort looking for

Figure 4.
Juan Pablo Bonet. From Miguel
Granell y Forcadell,  Homenaje a Juan Pablo
Bonet  (Madrid: Imprenta de Sordomudos,
1929). Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

cures for each and every one of our parts that suffers a lesion, never sought [a cure for muteness], or they never found it" (26). Moreover, he noted that "we know of not one [mute] who has spoken ... in virtue of nature, but rather, by art, because someone had taught them our language" (114). Here the author appeared to acknowledge the existence of other mutes who had been taught to talk—small wonder, considering that when he composed his book, he was living in the home of the constables of Castile, whose ancestors had been taught by Pedro Ponce two generations earlier.)

Reduction de las letras y arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos (Reduction of the letters and art for teaching mutes to speak) 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." The book was published in Madrid in 1620, about one year after Ramírez de Carrión had left the Spanish court to return to the marquis of Priego

at Montilla. Although this work contains no mention of de Carrión, it most likely represents an account of at least some of the methods he used to teach Luis de Velasco, methods Bonet must have glimpsed while both men were residing in the Velasco household.

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. This was the phonic method Manuel Ramírez de Carrión seems to have used with Luis de Velasco's hearing brother Bernardino. Although Bonet implied that he had invented the technique, no doubt he had lifted it from de Carrión. He advocated the same procedure to teach deaf people to speak; this too he no doubt appropriated from the tutor from Hellín. In addition to the discussion about teaching reading, the Reduction de las letras also contained a good 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" (109–110). A second cause of muteness, he wrote, was a defect of the tongue, so that an individual might be mute but not deaf. A person with both defects would be deaf as well as mute. Only those in whom muteness was due to deafness alone could be helped by the precepts of Bonet's Arte . 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" (249).

Bonet's identification of deafness as the most common cause of muteness constituted an advance over the thought of the Licenciado Lasso, who, writing at Oña seventy years earlier, had maintained that

the explanation for muteness did not reside in deafness alone. But if Bonet's account of the underlying cause of muteness was correct, his view of muteness itself could hardly have been more negative, for he contended that it impeded "the manifestation of the rational soul"—the belief that speech came from the soul and was the sole purveyor of reason was still with us—and he held that as a consequence, 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" (26). It is doubtful that Pedro Ponce, living in a monastery where speech was proscribed and sign language was used regularly to communicate, would have shared such uninformed views about muteness.

The author of the Arte 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" (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, albeit without hearing. The deaf pupil would produce the right sound when shown how to correctly position his articulators, just as strumming a guitar would produce the desired chord when the student's fingers were properly positioned on the strings.

The optimal time to teach the deaf child to talk, Bonet believed, was when the pupil was between the ages of six and eight. The first step was to teach the manual alphabet—not coincidentally, the same one used by Ramírez de Carrión. (Thanks to Bonet's book, this alphabet would eventually spread throughout continental Europe and the Americas, where its use among deaf people continues to this day.) At the same time the student learned to form the letters on his fingers, he also learned to write them. The next step was articulation. At this point the pupil was to be alone with his instructor, according to the author, because "the task requires very great attention, and that he not be distracted" (128). The two should be in a well-lit place, so the learner could readily observe the tutor's mouth. The teacher was counseled to be very patient, and to allow the pupil many tries. If the student became distressed because he

was unable to pronounce a particular sound, he should be allowed to go on to another, for he would master the troublesome articulation at a later time. Bonet likened the teaching of pronunciation to the task of tuning two instruments to the same pitch when neither tuner could hear the other's instrument.

The Arte recognized that many aspects of articulation occur inside the mouth and consequently are not visible to the student. Nevertheless, the author advised, "it would not be prudent to oblige all who address the mute to do so with the mouth open"; were hearing people to pronounce in such an exaggerated fashion, it would lead the mute to make faces when he spoke, and such grimaces would be "ugly" in deaf and hearing alike (229). To teach articulation, "for ease and so as not to go around putting one's fingers in the mute's mouth positioning his tongue," Bonet advocated use of a leather tongue to demonstrate the shapes it assumed and to supplement what could be seen of the tutor's mouth (129–130). And to illustrate the multiple vibrations of the Spanish rr, he recommended a paper tongue, to be set in motion by blowing across it.

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, with the finer points of meaning to be acquired through usage. 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," but suggesting that the gestures they devised should evoke what they wished to depict (146). Action verbs (e.g., run, walk, laugh) were likewise to be acted out. The "passions of the soul," however—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.

The student should be asked each evening what he had done during the day, and if he could not reply, the tutor should supply him with the appropriate response. Once the fundamentals of language had been mastered, the written word would form the basis for further acquisition. At this point the pupil should be given books to read, beginning with the most simple, and he should be obliged to pen answers to questions about them posed in writing, and thus engage in "lengthy conversations" (227–228).

As for lipreading, Bonet was convinced that it could not be taught. He argued that since the teacher himself did not possess this ability, and since he could not teach what he did not know, he could not possibly impart this skill to the pupil. Nevertheless, the author acknowledged that "many mutes" could read from the lips without instruction. He considered such individuals "exceptions" and credited their skill to their own "great attention," rather than to the genius of the teacher. "There is no set rule by which to teach the mute to understand from the movement of the lips," Bonet concluded, "and whoever dares to offer such a system does so, not trusting in himself, but rather in the mute, from whom he wishes to take that excellence in order to honor himself with it, because since people see him speak, read, and write, and together with this he understands well from the movement of the lips, they will believe that all is due to teaching, and the teacher will attribute it to himself" (229–230).^[30]

Although Bonet's pedagogy allowed for pantomime and gestures, which he called "demonstrative actions," he took a dim view of the use of signs. "Care shall be taken whenever asking the mute questions or responding to him ... never to reply with signs," he cautioned the teacher (148).^[31] And not surprisingly, his book contained very few instances of arbitrary signs, that is, signs whose meaning is derived from agreement among the users rather than from a transparent resemblance to an activity or a referent. One such sign was used, however, to instruct the pupil to join sounds to form syllables, or to join syllables to form words. One hand described a circle in the air, or as an alternative, the two hands were clasped tightly together (139–140). Arbitrary signs were also used to explain verb tenses. For "past" the hand moved back over the shoulder, and for "future" the hand arched forward in front of the body. Another arbitrary sign conveyed the concept "many": the teacher brought all five fingers together and wiggled them. (The description is rather imprecise, but the gesture seems similar, if not iden-

tical, to the sign for "many" in use in Spain today.) At this point Bonet made his only reference to the signs in use among deaf Spaniards at that time, commenting that this gesture, which was apparently unfamiliar to hearing people, "in the mutes signifies 'many'" (167).

This last remark is intriguing, for it seems to imply that there were common, agreed upon signs among an identifiable group of deaf people, suggesting their regular interaction in a confined geographical area, and possibly the existence of a deaf community and an established sign language. Such a group could no doubt have included the deaf members of the Velasco family, their deaf relatives, and most likely some hearing members of their households as well. The signs could well have been in use for generations, formed on the hands of Ponce's pupils Francisco and Pedro de Velasco, their deaf sisters Juliana and Bernardina, their grandnephew Luis de Velasco, and their deaf relatives at Montilla—the marquis of Priego, his aunt, and his sister. But the author had nothing more to say about this matter, leaving us to speculate on the existence of a Spanish deaf community and a Spanish sign language in his day.

Bonet was well aware of the ease of communication afforded by signs, for he held that they were our "natural language," and he observed that when two deaf people met, albeit for the first time, they could understand each other by way of signs (113). Nevertheless, when it came to the use of signs in the deaf student's household, Bonet was adamantly opposed. The pupil should be forbidden to use them, as should those hearing people who communicated with him. Instead, hearing individuals were to address the deaf person via the manual alphabet, and the deaf person was to respond orally. "It will be very necessary that in any home where there are mutes, all those who know how to read should know this [manual] alphabet to speak with it to the mute, and not with signs," Bonet advised, "because understanding by the hand or in writing, it is not well that those who talk to him use signs, nor that they permit him to make use of them, but rather that he respond by mouth to whatever he is asked, although he may err in the locution of his responses, and care must be taken to correct him always, because all those who learn a foreign language, by making errors and noting how they are corrected, come to learn it" (117). In all likelihood, however, deaf persons would have used signs to communicate with hearing members of the household, and hearing people would have responded in the same fashion. Indeed, the fact that Bonet admonished his hearing readers not to use signs with the "mutes" suggests that they were doing just that. And after all, the author himself learned deaf people's sign for "many."

Bonet's intransigence, his insistence on speech and on the total exclusion of signs in communicating with deaf people, would become the cornerstone of oralism. As we have seen, this misguided effort to "rehabilitate" deaf students through artificial speech, and thus to restore to them their "standing as men before others," as Bonet put it, arose when an already existent pedagogy was inappropriately applied to a population for whose needs it had not been designed. Indeed, the "oral method" might be more accurately called the "hearing method." In short, when deaf education moved outside the silent, signing monastery, it was no longer tailored to the needs of the student. Instead, an attempt was made to force deaf signers into a speaking and hearing mold, and this entailed suppressing their sign language.

What was Manuel Ramírez de Carrión's reaction to Bonet's Arte, and the author's claim that he had been Luis de Velasco's teacher? De Carrión was surely apprised of the book, for he was in Madrid in 1623, just three years after his rival's work had been published there.^[32] Even so, he never deigned to acknowledge the existence of Bonet's work, or to refute the claim that Bonet had taught Luis de Velasco. But some years after publication of the Arte, de Carrión published a book of his own, Maravillas de naturaleza .^[33] The work consisted of a collection of aphorisms, attributed to various authorities or to the author's own observations, and arranged in alphabetical order:^[34] "Abeja (bee), does not light on a dead body or on a wilted flower"; "Agua (water), weighs more in winter than in summer"; "Aguila (eagle), alone among birds is not struck by lightning"; "Cuerpo muerto de rayo (corpse struck by lightning), will not rot," and so on.^[35]

De Carrión's book was in no sense a manual on deaf education. Nevertheless, in the prologue the author discussed various inventions, among them the instruction of deaf people, and like Bonet before him, he too represented himself as the inventor of the teaching:

And why should we not enumerate among the greatest [inventions] (albeit to our own glory) the art of teaching the mute—be they mute from birth, or because they became deaf in childhood because of an accident—to read, write, and speak with the voice, an invention of which I am exceedingly proud, [and] of which I have numerous accredited examples. The first would be the marquis of Priego, my employer[;] had his teaching not been interrupted at the optimal age, he would speak with much perfection, just as he had started to do at the beginning of [his instruction]; but with what His Excellency reads and writes, assisted by his great understanding, he governs his estates in such a way that he justly deserves the name of prudent

Christian prince. The second example, fully consummated, would be the marquis of Fresno Don Luis de Velasco, brother of the constable of Castile, in whose teaching I spent four years, and what with having had some interruptions, I barely had three; he reads, writes, speaks, and reasons with such ability that one notices in him no other impediment except his deafness.^[36]

De Carrión went on to describe various other, less famous, pupils: "Don Juan Alonso de Medina, twenty-four, of Seville, at eighteen months of age, having been born with no impediment of the ear whatsoever and when he was already saying many things, fell from a bureau on which he had been seated and when his brain struck the floor he was left completely deaf from the fall, and in a few days he gradually forgot what he could say before, until he became mute, just as if he had been so from birth. Don Antonio Docampo y Benavides, knight of the Order of Alcántara and a resident of Madrid, who at the age of five could hear perfectly well and could talk as much as is usual for his age, suffered a great illness from which there followed a profound deafness, and in a few months he lost his speech and was left with the voice that is heard in mutes without articulation; this defect has been repaired in both [Don Alonso and Don Antonio] with my teaching, and they speak today in the manner that is known to all."^[37] De Carrión alluded to still others whom he had taught as well, but whose education, for one reason or another, had not been completed. In the same prologue the author also claimed to have invented the reading method he had utilized with Bernardino de Velasco, the seventh constable of Castile, even though, as we have seen, the technique was already well known.

Elsewhere in the book, de Carrión commented on the relationship between deafness and muteness:

Those deaf from birth will of necessity be mute, and also those who become deaf in childhood, even if they had been able to speak. The reason for the first [phenomenon] is that since words are chosen arbitrarily by the will of men and have by nature no more meaning than that which is given them by the consent of their first inventors, he who has never heard can hardly know what name was given to the "hat" by one who, just as he called it thus, could as well have called it "taratala" and it would mean the same. ... Whence we understand that of necessity what the tongue is to pronounce must first enter by the ear. The same occurs in one who loses his hearing in childhood, since being unable to conserve the notion of the words because the brain is very tender and because he has made little use of them, he forgets them easily. To which is added the fact that it is not possible to reinforce the memory with the use of his own pronunciation or that of others, since he lacks

hearing, the judge of words and that which tells us when we pronounce well or badly. Because he who is totally deaf not only does not hear what is said to him, but not even what he himself pronounces; whence it is demonstrated also that the mute's impediment is born of the deficiency of the ear and not of the tongue, because the latter is free and disposed to speak if the memory administers the words and they know how to form the articulation. Which doctrine is proven with the example of mutes taught to speak by art, who move the tongue and articulate without impediment. And if someone tells me that they do not do so with the perfection of those who hear, I will reply that that is not much, since they have not perceived what is spoken by way of the instrument nature destined for their apprehension, which is the ear, on account of being deprived of it, and art must make use of extraordinary measures to inform the tongue.^[38]

De Carrión never elaborated on the "extraordinary measures" he employed to "inform the tongue," however. For this we may rely at least in part on Bonet's book, which as we have seen most likely represents what the author could glean of the secretive tutor's tactics. We find another reference to de Carrión's methods in the account of Pedro de Castro, a Jewish physician who practiced medicine in Spain and France, as well as in Italy, where he served as first physician to the duke of Mantua.^[39] De Castro himself had reportedly taught a deaf child in Vizcaya, and he claimed to have learned the "rare secret" of making deaf people hear by talking with Ramírez de Carrión, whom he referred to as the inventor, and by "philosophizing with extraordinary perseverance."^[40] Although he promised to publish the secret at a later date, apparently he never did. But another physician by the name of Sachs of Lewenheim provided an account of a cure for deafness attributed to Pedro de Castro. After the patient had been purged "according to his physical constitution, or temperament," the crown of the head was shaved, then slathered with an ointment concocted from spirits, saltpeter or purified niter, and oil of bitter almonds. The mixture was boiled until the spirits evaporated, after which one ounce of naphtha was mixed in well with a spatula. The salve was applied twice daily, and especially at night before the deaf person retired. In the morning, once his face was washed and his hair combed back with an ivory comb, the patient was spoken to at the bald spot, with the result that "the deaf-mute hears with clarity the voice that in no way could he hear through the ears."^[41] This part of the "cure" Sachs described was entirely in keeping with the medical ideas of the time, dominated as they were by the theory of humors, and the origin of these practices was most likely to be found in the "philosophiz-

ing" of de Castro the physician, rather than in the pedagogy of de Carrión the schoolmaster. If so, we can understand why no such procedures appear in Bonet's book.

The teaching method described by Sachs differed not one whit from the techniques advocated by Bonet: "If the deaf-mute does not know how to read, he shall be made to learn the alphabet; and each letter of it should be said to him several times until the deaf-mute can pronounce it; and then he will proceed to the pronunciation of words, showing him successively the objects named so that he will learn their names; and lastly he will be spoken to by joining words together, so that he may know how to order the words."^[42]

We have seen that Juan Pablo Bonet in his Arte made no mention of Ramírez de Carrión, and similarly de Carrión in his Maravillas made no reference to Bonet. Moreover, both men failed to acknowledge their predecessor, Pedro Ponce de León, who had died nearly four decades before Bonet's work appeared. The omission of any reference to Ponce is particularly glaring because both writers cite a goodly number of authorities—Bonet, for instance, at the beginning of his book lists seventy-four authors cited in the text. (Ponce's name does appear once in Bonet's Arte, however—in the censor's approval Antonio Pérez, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of San Martín in Madrid, remarked that such a work was "very much desired in our Spain since our monk Fray Pedro Ponce de León initiated this marvel of making the mutes speak.")^[43] Despite this reticence concerning their predecessor at Oña, it is inconceivable that either man could have been unaware of Fray Pedro's legacy. Both were, after all, in the employ of the Velascos, whose deaf ancestors Ponce had instructed two generations earlier, and no doubt the family had kept alive the memory of those deaf relatives and their venerable teacher. Juan Fernández de Velasco, the sixth constable of Castile, had been personally acquainted with his deaf uncle Pedro, Ponce's most gifted student, and was himself the father of a deaf child, Luis de Velasco; thus, he was surely apprised of the monk's activities at Oña. Because of the Velasco family history, then, both de Carrión and Bonet must have known about Pedro Ponce.

Just how much they knew about his techniques is another question, and there has been no shortage of theories concerning the connection between Ponce, Bonet, and de Carrión. Some have speculated that Bonet, while in the employ of the constable, would have had access to notebooks belonging to Ponce's students, their papers, and possibly even the monk's manuscript, and that in his Arte he merely plagiar-

ized Ponce's method.^[44] But a simpler scenario has already been suggested, namely, that Bonet plagiarized not Ponce but Ramírez de Carrión. De Carrión taught the marquis of Fresno during a four-year period when Bonet was present in the Velasco household, providing ample opportunity for the constable's secretary to learn something of the tutor's procedures. With de Carrión close at hand and successfully instructing young Luis, Bonet would have had no need to plagiarize Ponce.

And what about Ramírez de Carrión? What, if any, was his link to Pedro Ponce? Prior to his arrival at the Velasco home, de Carrión had already tutored several deaf students—first in his hometown of Hellín, then at Montilla.^[45] His procedure of choice—the unimaginative application of hearing pedagogy to deaf signers—was already in place years before his services were required in Madrid.^[46] But did he draw on Ponce's methods once he joined the Velasco household, and are those methods what is reflected in Bonet's Arte ?^[47] The answer would seem to be no, for evidently the two approaches differ significantly—assuming, of course, that Bonet's work is indeed a reflection of dc Carrión's procedures, and that we can rely on the accounts of Ponce's contemporaries and the page from the manuscript found at Oña to evaluate the monk's methods.

For one thing, there was the role of signs in instruction. Bonet's prohibition of their use marked a radical departure from Ponce's approach, which apparently employed them liberally. ("On doors, windows, and stairs, and arches and tables and all things put their names in writing, so that they may know their names and, lastly, all for the good, indicate them to them by signs," the author of the manuscript from Oña had recommended.)^[48] The two also differed on the use of signs for communication, as opposed to teaching. Bonet sought to banish signs from the deaf person's household and advocated obliging him to speak—"it is not well that those who talk to him use signs, nor that they permit him to make use of them, but rather that he respond by mouth," he declared.^[49] But Ponce lived in a signing milieu in which deaf and hearing alike communicated regularly in manual language, the monk himself had taught the Velasco brothers the signs of his order, and within the monastery it was speech, not signing, that was frowned upon.

Then there was the question of the manual alphabet. De Carrión had already employed this procedure to instruct his deaf students before he journeyed to Madrid, so he did not learn it from any of Ponce's

materials the Velascos might have had.^[50] And the alphabet of the Oña manuscript, in which the letters were represented on the joints of the fingers, was different from the one used by de Carrión and reproduced by Bonet, in which each letter was represented by a different hand shape. Finally, there was the phonic method of teaching the sound for each letter. It is not known whether Ponce employed this procedure, but the Bautista brothers made clear that Ramírez de Carrión had used it before ever crossing the constable's doorstep, suggesting that he did not plagiarize this technique from any of the monk's papers that might have been in the Velascos' possession, either.^[51]

In addition to differences in the tools of the trade like signs and the manual alphabet, there was another, even more important distinction between the two methods. For the author at Oña, the written word formed the basis of instruction, while in the method set forth by Bonet, the foundation was articulation. Both Pedro de Velasco, Ponce's most outstanding student, and Francisco Vallés, the king's physician, stated that the monk began with the written word and that only later did he teach speech. Pedro de Velasco related having filled his notebook with "all the Spanish words" before ever progressing to articulation,^[52] and Vallés, after observing the venerable Benedictine in action, concluded that "the most correct procedure for the deaf is to begin with writing."^[53] But in the Arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos, articulation, the mechanical production of speech sounds, was the cornerstone of instruction, and the student was first led to pronounce the letters, then syllables and words, and finally to read aloud, at which point, according to Bonet, "there is no need to be concerned that he might not understand what he reads, because up to now we don't intend anything other than that he join the letters in such a way that his reading shall be intelligible to whoever hears him, although he may not know what he is saying, because this is to be taught later."^[54] In Ponce's method comprehension of the written word accompanied by signs preceded production, while in the method recommended by Bonet, oral production, which must have been parrotlike, preceded comprehension.

It would seem, then, that although de Carrión must have known about Ponce's teaching, the secretive tutor did not appropriate his predecessor's methods. Ponce, both in his use of sign language and in his initial reliance on the written word, seems to have tailored the method to the student—proceeding from reading to speech was, as Vallés had noted, just the opposite of what was done with hearing children. But de Carrión, assuming still that Bonet's Arte actually reflects his method,

attempted to mold the students to the method, banning the use of signs and eliciting speech before comprehension. In short, he treated deaf pupils as if they were hearing. In so doing, he emerges as the oralist par excellence.

After publishing his book in 1620, Juan Pablo Bonet showed no more interest in deaf education; instead, he dedicated the remainder of his life to politics. His career had been at a virtual standstill since 1607, when Juan de Velasco, the sixth constable of Castile, had died, and the world's first published author on deaf education had stayed on in the service of Don Juan's son Bernardino, the seventh constable. That same year Philip III made Bonet a varlet servant, a modest palace official whose duty it was to inspect and clean the king's cutlery on days when the monarch was to eat in public, to supply him with bread wrapped in a napkin, and to see to the tasting of foods before they were served.^[55] No doubt the ambitious Bonet grew restless in his post as royal silverware inspector and food-taster, and his position as secretary to Don Bernardino, who was still a child, held little promise of excitement. Thus in 1621, one year after publication of Reduction de las letras y arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos, Bonet left the Velascos to sign on as secretary to their relative the count of Monterrey, brother-in-law of the royal favorite, the count duke of Olivares, and at this point his adventures began anew. The following year Philip IV named Bonet's new employer special ambassador to the Holy See, and the author of the Arte packed his bags and journeyed with the count of Monterrey to Rome.^[56] Upon Bonet's return to Spain, Philip IV made him royal counselor and secretary of the Supreme Council of Aragon, and when the count of Monterrey presided over the Aragonese parliament in Barbastro and Calatayud in 1626, Bonet was elected promovedor, or president, of the noblemen. Despite widespread opposition to the king's request of a new subsidy of men and monies from Bonet's native Aragón, the promovedor vigorously defended the crown's interests against those of his own region, bringing to bear all his skill as a statesman and politician to gain the approval of the cortes . For his efforts he incurred the enmity of his compatriots, but a few months later Philip IV rewarded his loyalty by making him a member of the Order of Santiago.^[57] In 1628 Bonet returned to Rome with the count of Monterrey, whom Philip IV had sent once again to the Holy See.^[58] Five years later he was back in Spain recruiting troops for service in Naples, where the count of Monterrey

had been appointed viceroy and captain general. This would be Bonet's last mission, for he died in Madrid in 1633.

Luis de Velasco was left in Madrid without a teacher when Ramírez de Carrión returned to the marquis of Priego at Montilla in 1619. After Bonet tried his hand—unsuccessfully—at teaching young Luis, his mother, the duchess of Frías, sent the boy to be schooled at Montilla, where he lived for nearly a year in the home of his deaf cousin. Eventually she arranged for Ramírez to return to Madrid to finish her son's education.^[59] The tutor would later refer to Luis's instruction as having been "fully consummated," and Luis himself was fond of saying, "I am not mute but merely deaf."^[60] A chronicler of the house of Velasco recounted that only "the rage of his actions" could on occasion trip up Luis's tongue, for he was a "passionate and daring gentleman of heroic spirit and gallantry, strong and extremely courageous."^[61] In January 1628, when Luis had not yet turned eighteen, he married Catalina de Velasco y Ayula—a blood relative, of course—and shortly thereafter Philip IV conferred upon him the title of first marquis of Fresno. In later years he was granted the privilege of wearing jewels and colored apparel, and was named comendador, or high ranking knight, of the Order of Alcántara. The order, which Luis was authorized to enter in the town of Berlanga, granted him lands, jurisdiction over them, and the right to collect rent, and exempted him from the obligation of residing there. He maintained correspondence with various Spanish and European personalities and stood in for his elder brother Bernardino, the seventh constable of Castile, when the latter was called away because of his obligations as governor of Milan and captain general of the army of Old Castile. During Don Bernardino's absences Luis de Velasco was left in charge of the household, on occasion replacing the constable in his duties at the royal palace and representing him at various public functions. Here, then, was a highly visible deaf nobleman who by his example no doubt contributed to the growing awareness that deaf people could be educated and could execute the duties associated with their station in life.

As for the marquis of Priego, Luis de Velasco's deaf cousin, it was only with the greatest reluctance that he had allowed his tutor to depart from Montilla in 1615, when de Carrión had been summoned to the Velasco household in Madrid. The Young nobleman's instruction had been interrupted at a crucial stage, and his teacher was not to return until some four years later.

Throughout his life, the marquis of Priego seldom ventured from his estates at Montilla, for to do so was to find himself handicapped by the hearing and speaking world, and forced to deal in a medium not suited to his needs. On one such occasion Don Alonso committed a breach of etiquette before the king himself, jeopardizing his rights and those of his descendants as grandees of the highest order. A contemporary who years later sought the king's comprehension and forgiveness on behalf of the house of Priego explained the behavior of the deaf marquis:

[Don Alonso] went to Seville to kiss Your Majesty's hand in 1624, and then Your Majesty saw fit to order him to cover his head after he had spoken, as with grandees of the second class. But this act should not harm his House nor the successor to it, for many reasons. The first, because of his natural impediment, since he is mute by nature and because it is necessary to communicate with him by way of interpreters and signs, for which reason he cannot be as attentive to the ancient rights.... As soon as they advised him that his standing had been harmed, he begged for their restitution, and thus when he kissed the queen's hand in the year 1644, he did not speak until Her Majesty had ordered him to cover his head.^[62]

Spanish grandees of the first class had the right to greet the king with their heads covered; those of the second class greeted him with heads uncovered, then covered them to hear the king's reply; and those of the third class both greeted the king and heard his reply with heads uncovered. By addressing his sovereign before being instructed to cover his head that day in Seville, the marquis of Priego had behaved like a grandee of the second class, rather than of the first, endangering his standing and that of his successors.

At his home at Montilla, however, it was a different story, for there Alonso Fernández de Córdoba surrounded himself with able administrators with whom he could communicate easily in signs or in writing.^[63] (So much for de Carrión/Bonet's admonition that those residing in the mute's household should never address him in signs and should oblige him to respond orally.) During the nearly forty years he ruled over his marquisate, Don Alonso skillfully managed his estates, and his achievements on behalf of his noble lineage left nothing to be desired. In 1624 he was made a knight of the Order of the Toisón de Oro, the Golden Fleece, by Philip IV, and a few years later he secured from the king the title of "city" for what had until then been the "town" of Montilla.^[64] A younger hearing brother disputed his deaf sibling's right to rule his estates, but Don Alonso successfully fended off the legal challenge.^[65] And on several occasions he increased the patrimony of the house of Priego. In 1634 his young grandson Lorenzo Gaspar Suárez de

Figueroa y Córdoba, fourth duke of Feria, died childless and unmarried, paving the way for the marquis of Priego to inherit the duchy of Feria. As a result, Don Alonso, fifth marquis of Priego, third marquis of Villafranca, and second marquis of Montalbán, became the fifth duke of Feria, fourth marquis of Villalba, and master of all the house of Figueroa and Manuel. One year later when his cousin Alonso Gaspar Fernández de Córdoba y Alvarado, marquis of Celada, also died without issue, the deaf marquis inherited the marquisate of Celada as well.

The marquis of Priego died at his refuge at Montilla in 1645 at the age of fifty-six and was laid to rest, according to his own instructions, in the family pantheon in the church at Montilla's Jesuit school, "in the most ordinary part and close by where people regularly walk."^[66] In the words of one family chronicler, "With the greatness of his understanding he made art overcome nature, and ... he did not need to speak in order to govern his estates," for "the majesty of his judgment and talent put everything in order."^[67] Here was another deaf person schooled outside the monastery who by his example showed that deaf people could be taught, they could succeed in high places, and "judgment and talent" were not limited to the hearing.

Manuel Ramírez de Carrión bade farewell to the Velascos and returned to the marquis of Priego around 1619, one year before Bonet published his book. For nearly two decades he continued on at Montilla, where he served as both teacher and secretary to the marquis. In the fall of 1636 he was again called to Madrid to teach a deaf child. This time it was Philip IV himself who sent for de Carrión, and the pupil was none other than the king's own relative, Emmanuele Filiberto Amadeus II, prince of Carignan and grandson of a Spanish infanta. The new disciple was the eldest child of María de Borbón Soissons and Duke Thomas of Savoy.^[68] Duke Thomas, one of Italy's leading aristocrats, was a general of the Spanish armies, and it may be on account of this that the family had heard of the teacher of deaf noblemen.^[69] A more likely source, however, was the king himself, for years earlier and in Ramírez's presence he had questioned Bernardino de Velasco concerning his brother Luis's instruction. (Bernardino, it will be recalled, told the future king that Luis's teacher was Ramírez de Carrión and assured him that his brother was able to speak, but declined to reveal the tutor's methods.) At any rate, Emmanuele Filiberto's mother appeared at the Spanish court with her young son, and Philip IV called for Ramírez de Carrión.

De Carrión had been instructing the prince of Carignan in Madrid for some two years when the historian José Pellicer y Tovar wrote his Pirámide baptismal in honor of the young tutee. The preface was addressed to the boy's teacher, whom Pellicer referred to as "the intelligence that moves with his teaching the lips of the most serene Emmanuele Filiberto Amadeus."^[70] The historian gave this account of the events that had led to Ramírez's instruction of the prince:

Everyone rightly agrees that, among the pomp and splendour the King Our Lord (may God protect him) bestowed upon the serene Princess of Carignan, among the honors and favors Her Highness received from His Majesty, one of the greatest was having arranged with such loving care that Your Grace should come from Montilla to this court as teacher of her first born, who found in such a great Monarch not only assistance, protection, and shelter, but also speech, teaching, and knowledge, placating with liberality and largess the slights of fate.... Your Grace was attending the most excellent Don Alfonso Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa, marquis of Priego, duke of Feria, whose teacher and secretary you were, and who, because he suffers from this defect, was fortunately beginning to experience the art of which your work was the inventor. His Majesty commanded him in a letter of October 10, 1636, to send Your Grace to this court, requesting you on loan for temporary employment, and offering to return you to him when the purpose for which you were summoned had been achieved. And even though that prince, grandee of Spain many times over, needed you so much at his side, as is revealed by his replies, which were as distressed as they were submissive, and which go as far as a vassal may go with his king, he had to obey, having been informed that in all the kingdoms that form part of his extended monarchy, there could be found no other person to whom to entrust a doctrine of such importance, education of this kind. And just as the defect that nature placed in so distinguished a personage as Emmanuele Filiberto Amadeus, denying him the use of speech, caused universal pity, so it has caused no less astonishment to see teaching correct such a great deficiency, restoring speech to him in the noble Castilian language, so that as far as possible that natural defect is remedied. And for your diligence and proficiency His Majesty awarded the title of Royal Secretary that Your Grace now enjoys, along with other favors, which are but the beginning of the reward owed to such efforts and such superior ability.^[71]

After some time in Madrid, Emmanuele Filiberto returned to Italy, accompanied by Ramírez de Carrión, who stayed with him there for a number of years. In 1644, when he was sixteen years of age, the prince was appointed governor of the city and province of Ivrea, and the following year his teacher returned to Spain—possibly because of the fatal

illness of his old master, the marquis of Priego. De Carrión's death occurred five years later, in 1650, in Madrid.

The prince of Carignan must have mourned his tutor's departure, for like the marquis of Priego, whose "distressed and submissive" protestations had not dissuaded Philip IV from summoning de Carrión to the court years before, Emmanuele Filiberto had come to depend heavily on his teacher. This time, however, de Carrión left behind someone who could continue the instruction, his son Miguel Ramírez. In 1645 the prince explained in a letter, "because he left his son in his place I am consoled, for he is very gentle and he does it very well and he is beginning to teach me the Italian language."^[72] It is not clear how long Miguel Ramírez remained with his pupil in Italy, but the year 1660 found the tutor at Montilla.^[73]

The Italian court initially declined to take the deaf prince of Carignan seriously. The young man responded by refusing to stay there, for which disobedience he was sent to France and left to languish for a time without a teacher, as punishment. A letter he penned in Compiègne in 1649 showed how much he longed for instruction, for he lamented, "If I am not sent someone who continues to teach me, I fear I shall become like before, and be treated like a two-year-old child, even though I am a grown man."^[74] His despair is not surprising, because unlike the deaf person who is immersed in a signing environment, where a steady stream of readily intelligible language affords the opportunity to learn from a variety of sources, the deaf prince taught orally saw his education come to an abrupt halt when he was separated from his tutor.

Nevertheless, the life Emmanuele Filiberto was eventually to lead would be considered brilliant by any standards, for in due time he would win respect and occupy positions of importance. During the 1650s he campaigned in Lombardy, was made a colonel in the French cavalry, and was appointed deputy to the reigning Carlos Emmanuele of Savoy, and in 1663 he became governor of the city of Asti and the province of the same name. In 1684, when he was in his mid-fifties, he wed Princess Maria Caterina d'Este; her father, the duke of Modena, gave Emmanuele Filiberto his daughter's hand in recognition of the warm friendship between the two men, who had fought together at the siege of Pavia. When the deaf prince died in 1709, at the age of eighty-one, the court of Louis XIV went into mourning for two weeks.^[75]

An account left by a contemporary shed additional light on the prince's instruction under Ramírez de Carrión. The description of his

teacher's methods provides details of what the secretive tutor himself called "extraordinary measures" taken to "inform the tongue." Recorded here are procedures nowhere to be found in Bonet's Arte, techniques the author may have been unable to observe during his years in the Velasco household—or reluctant to commit to print. While Bonet counseled patience and explicitly rejected violent means of instruction, de Carrión, so it seems, took a different tack. As Emmanuelc Filiberto's contemporary related,

After trying everything, [the prince's family] turned him over to a man who promised to make him speak and understand provided that he be given so much authority over him for many years that the family would not even know what became of him. The truth is he behaved toward him like a dog trainer would or like those people who for money display trained animals that surprise you with their skill and obedience and seem to understand and explain by signs all that their master tells them. He used hunger, bastinado [beatings on the soles of the feet with a stick], deprivation of light, and reward commensurate with performance.^[76]

Could this be the real reason why Bonet wrote that for teaching speech, it was essential that the teacher be alone with the student? Was this why young Luis de Velasco, perhaps alerted by his cousin at Montilla, refused to go by himself to his first lesson with Manuel Ramírez de Carrión? Did such treatment eventually create in the pupils a psychological dependence on their tutor-tormentor, producing in them a kind of Stockholm syndrome, and explaining at least in part their extreme reluctance to allow him to depart?

The author of this account of Emmanuele Filiberto's training went on to observe,

Such was [the tutor's] success that the boy came to grasp everything from the movements of the lips and a few gestures, to understand everything, to read, write, and even speak, although with considerable difficulty. The boy applied himself with so much determination, intelligence, and insight, profiting from all the cruel lessons he received, that he possessed several languages, some sciences, and history perfectly. He became a good politician, even to the point of being consulted on affairs of state, and was a public figure in Turin more for his ability than his birth. There he had his little court and conducted himself with dignity all his long life, which should be considered a wonder.^[77]

Here was yet another educated deaf man who lived his life outside the convent, and who was renowned for his talent and his abilities. Among

his descendants were the nineteenth- and twentieth-century kings of united Italy, including Umberto II, the last Italian king.

Juan Pablo Bonet and Manuel Ramírez de Carrín had resided under the same roof, both in the employ of the constables of Castile, from 1615–1619, then they had gone their separate ways. From this point on, however, history would confuse the two, and each man contributed his share to this confusion. Bonet, for his part, had insinuated that he was both Luis's teacher and the creator of the method described in his Arte, claiming it was he who had found the "secret path."^[78] De Carrión, too, professed to have invented the teaching that had been practiced at Oña more than half a century before, referring to it as an "invention [of which] I am exceedingly proud."^[79] Neither man mentioned the name of Pedro Ponce. At his death Ponce had been eulogized as "renowned in all the world."^[80] Yet by the time Bonet's book appeared he had apparently been all but forgotten, and most posthumous references were limited to either religious chroniclers (generally Benedictines) or writers associated with the Velasco family.^[81]

The coast was clear, then, for both Bonet and de Carrión to pass themselves off as inventors of the teaching, and in this undertaking Bonet would be the more successful of the two. After all, de Carrión had done his best to conceal his procedures, but Bonet had published a book on the subject, and it was probably for this reason that many of his contemporaries-the playwrights Lope de Vega and Juan Pérez de Montalbán, the calligrapher Pedro DÍaz Morante, the philosopher Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, the poet López de Zárate and the teacher Constantino Susias, among them-took him to be the inventor of the method he committed to paper.^[82] But de Carrión too had his defenders, most notably the historian José Pellicer y Tovar, who seemed to take a personal interest in clarifying the situation.^[83] In the preface to his Pirámide baptismal, Pellicer called Ramírez de Carrión "the inventor of the most extraordinary novelty that has been seen or known by mortals, or that they will ever discover," and asserted that Bonet had composed his work "because of how he saw Your Grace proceeding and what he heard from your mouth, as a servant and dependent of the house of Velasco."^[84]

The year was 1638, and the confusion concerning the respective roles of Bonet and de Carrión was by this time considerable. One writer attributed Luis de Velasco's teaching to a foreigner,^[85] while others, assuming that the author of the book on the subject must have also practiced the

art, credited Juan Pablo Bonet. Thus Pellicer, "desiring to know with certainty not only the inventor of such an extraordinary method but [also] the legitimate master of the teaching of this gentleman [Luis de Velasco]," began by perusing letters written by the principles who years before had been instrumental in bringing de Carrión to Madrid to teach the young deaf aristocrat.^[86] Not satisfied with the results of his investigation, Pellicer then put the question to the pupil himself. Responding in his own hand, Luis replied that "his only teacher of speech, reading, and writing was Don Manuel Ramírez de Carrión ... and any opinion that might contradict this, will be in opposition to the truth."^[87] Pellicer concluded, "May this documented reply disabuse the misinformed, and may they restore to Your Grace the credit and esteem that you are due, counting you among the number of those glorious men who found the most hidden secrets of all the sciences, and who have been of such importance in politics, commerce, [and] scholarship, and an example to other mortals."^[88] The historian expressed particular satisfaction at having set the record straight: "And may it be my glory to have unraveled the confusion surrounding this truth, and left it written for the ages to come, which I suspect will give me credit for the testimony as faithful as it is legal, with which I bear witness."^[89]

The confusion was not to be so easily dispelled, for Pellicer's preface, with its tribute to de Carrión, its accusation of Bonet, and the testimony of Luis de Velasco himself that de Carrión had been his only teacher, did not see publication. For reasons that are not clear, his Pirámide baptismal, when it eventually appeared, was dedicated not to Emmanuele Filiberto, as Pellicer had originally intended, but to a daughter of Philip IV, Maria Teresa Viviana of Austria. Under these circumstances, it was not surprising that the author no longer sang the praises of the tutor of the deaf prince of Carignan, and the preface addressed to Ramírez de Carrión was omitted.^[90]

The waters were further muddied in 1644 with publication of Sir Kenelm Digby's Two Treatises: In the one of which, the Nature of Bodies, in the other, the Nature of Mans Soule, is looked into: In a way of discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules . Dibgy was in Madrid in 1623 with the retinue of Charles, the prince of Wales, who had journeyed to Spain to woo Philip IV's daughter, with an eye to uniting England and Spain through marriage. Although Prince Charles's efforts at winning the infanta were ultimately unsuccessful, the visit was not without its diversions, for while at the Spanish court the royal suitor and Sir Kenelm made the acquaintance of Luis de Velasco. Luis, then a lad of thirteen,

thoroughly captivated the English visitors, as is clear from the account Digby would publish some two decades later. In his Two Treatises the author described "a Noble man of great quality that I knew in Spaine, the younger brother of the Constable of Castile." He related that "the Spanish Lord was born deafe; so deafe, that if a Gun were shot off close by his care, he could not heare it: and consequently, he was dumbe, for not being able to heare the sound of words, he could never imitate nor understand them. The lovelinesse of his face, and especially the exceeding life and spiritfulnesse of his eyes, and the comelinesse of his person and whole composure of his body throughout, were pregnant signes of a well tempered mind within. And therefore all that knew him, lamented much the want of meanes to cultivate it, and to imbrue it with the notions which it seemed to be capable of in regard of its selfe; had it not been so crossed by this unhappy accident."

Digby explained that although physicians and surgeons had long sought to cure Luis's deafness, all efforts had been in vain, until "at the last, there was a Priest who undertooke the teaching him to understand others when they spoke, and to speake himselfe that others might understand him. What at the first he was laught at for, made him after some yeeres be looked upon as if he had wrought a miracle. In a word; after strange patience, constancy and paines, he brought the young Lord to speake as distinctly as any man whosoever; and to understand so perfectly what others said that he would not lose a word in a whole daies conversation."

According to Sir Kenelm, the young nobleman's lipreading abilities were nothing short of remarkable: "He could discerne in another, whether he spoke shrill or low: and he would repeate after any body, any hard word whatsoever. Which the Prince tryed often; not onely in English, but by making some Welchmen that served his Highnesse, speake words of their language. Which he so perfectly ecchoed, that I confesse I wondered more at that, then at all the rest." The prince's abilities greatly impressed Digby:

his so exact imitation of the Welch pronunciation: for that tongue (like the Hebrew) employeth much the gutturall Letters: and the motions of that part which frameth them, cannot be scene nor judged by the eye, otherwise then by the effect they may happily make by consent in the other parts of the mouth, exposed to view: for the knowledge hee had of what they said, sprung from his observing the motions they made; so that hee could con-

verse currently in the light, though they he talked with, whispered never so softly. And I have seene him at the distance of a large chambers breadth, say words after one, that I standing close by the speaker could not heare a syllable of. But if he were in the darke, or if one turned his face out of his sight, he was capable of nothing one said.

Luis's teacher declined to take credit for his pupil's startling ability to lip-read and repeat words because, according to Digby, he acknowledged that "the rules of his art reached not to produce that effect with any certainty. And therefore concluded, this in him must spring from other rules he had framed unto himselfe, out of his own attentive observation: which, the advantage that nature had justly given him in the sharpenesse of his other senses, to supply the want of this; endowed him with an ability and sagacity to do, beyond any other man that had his hearing."^[91]

In an apparent allusion to Bonet's Reduction de las letras y arte para enseñar a ablar los mudos, Digby stated that "they who have a curiosity to see by what steps the master proceeded in teaching him, may satisfie it by a booke which he himself hath writ in Spanish upon that subject, to instruct others how to teach deafe and dumbe persons to speake." And referring to Luis's teacher, Sir Kenelm added, "The Priest who by his booke and art occasioned this discourse, I am told is still alive, and in the service of the Prince of Carignan, where he continueth (with some that have need of his paines) the same imployment as he did with the constables brother."^[92]

Digby's account contained several inaccuracies—as well it might, for it had been written some twenty years after the fact—which increased the confusion already surrounding Ramírez de Carrión and Bonet. Luis's teacher and the man who would later instruct the prince of Carignan were one and the same, namely Manuel Ramírez de Carrión.^[93] And it was doubtless Ramírez whom Digby met in the Spanish court in 1623. By this time Bonet was no longer in the Velasco household, having entered the service of the count of Monterrey two years earlier, and when Digby wrote his Two Treatises in 1644, it was de Carrión who was teaching the prince of Carignan, whereas Bonet had been dead for some ten years. But the Englishman was mistaken when he stated that Luis's teacher was a priest—here he seemed to confuse young de Velasco's tutor with Ponce, the monk who decades earlier had taught the boy's granduncles at the monastery at Oña. He was also mistaken when he

asserted that those desirous of knowing the tutor's methods might read about them in a book "which he himself hath written in Spanish upon that subject," for as we have seen, it was not Luis's teacher but Juan Pablo Bonet who wrote the Arte para enseñar a ablar, los mudos .

The Two Treatises, which was republished in London in 1658 and in Frankfurt six years later, attracted considerable attention. More than any other, Digby's account was instrumental in spreading word of the Spanish art throughout Europe—and with it, the misinformation concerning Juan Pablo Bonet and Manuel Ramíirez de Carrión.^[94]

In addition to Bonet and de Carrión, a few other Spaniards also seem to have attempted to teach deaf people during the seventeenth century. In 1620, the same year in which Bonet published his Arte, a Doctor Rodrigo Moyano, professor of philosophy and theology at various Spanish universities and author of a manuscript entitled "Arte de hacer hablar los mudos" (Art to make mutes speak), approached the Spanish parliament requesting that he be given a group of deaf students with whom to demonstrate his method. Moyano claimed that "with his study and work he has achieved the marvelous art of making deaf-mutes speak, teaching them not only to pronounce vocally with intelligible expression any words and to read any writings (which is the first part of it), but also to speak with correctness and elegance[,] reason and good order, understanding what they say and what is said to them in whatever language they are taught; and also to perceive (which is what should be greatly esteemed) what others speak only from seeing them move the lips and tongue (which are the other two parts of this art, for which until now there has been no news of anyone having achieved and formulated a method)."^[95] Moyano sought permission to publish his approach, and a commission appointed by parliament, judging his work to be "a very useful thing for the public good," agreed to have him demonstrate his techniques by instructing a deaf child, Roque de Ayala. After this point, however, history provides no more information about either Dr. Movano or the manuscript he seems to have had prepared for publication.^[96]

So in 1620 there were at least two practitioners of deaf education on the Spanish scene, Moyano and Ramírez de Carrión, in addition to Bonet, the author of the Arte . But when Philip IV sought a tutor for the prince of Carignan in 1638, de Carrión was, according to the historian José Pellicer y Tovar, the only one in the realm to whom he could entrust this mission. By 1645, however, de Carrión had trained at least one suc-

cessor, his son Miguel, who remained behind in Italy teaching the prince of Carignan when his father returned to Spain. There are reports of another descendant as well, one Diego Ramírez, who is variously referred to as the son of Manuel Ramírez and as the son of Miguel, and who by some accounts also continued the family tradition of deaf education. Some claim it was Diego Ramírez who in the early years of the eighteenth century taught Sor Josefa de Guzmán, a Franciscan nun of the noble house of Medina-Sidonia, but others maintain that Sor Josefa's teacher was not Diego but Miguel Ramírez.^[97] It is also said that during the seventeenth century a deaf religious, Father Antonio Fenollet, ran a public academy of painting where he instructed deaf-mutes;^[98] if so, he may have been the first deaf Spaniard to teach others of his kind. But to judge from what remains of the historical record, by the early eighteenth century deaf education in Spain had virtually ceased to exist, and the work undertaken in the mid-1500s came to be neglected and all but abandoned.^[99]

The seventeenth century had seen lay tutors appropriate procedures designed for hearing children to teach their deaf charges, thus establishing the methodological foundation of oralism. Juan Pablo Bonet's Arte detailed the particulars of the approach, and word of the work begun by Ponce in the 1500s continued to spread, due in no small measure to Bonet's book. But despite the nation's achievements in deaf education, and despite the fame of its prominent deaf aristocrats, by the end of the century, Spain could point to few, if any, practitioners of the art.