1. In the United States, "Deaf" with an uppercase D often refers to social groupings and cultural identifications resulting from interactions among people with hearing loss, while "deaf" with a lowercase d denotes the audiological condition of hearing loss (e.g., see Erting and Woodward 1979, on the distinction). Because the convention is not used in Spain today, and because much of my material deals with a time in which the convention did not exist, I use the lowercase term when referring to the Spanish deaf community.

2. Deaf communities may constitute cultural minorities or subcultures as well (on the American deaf community see, e.g., Padden and Humphries 1988). In view of the considerable common ground shared by many deaf and hearing people, however, recent discussion has questioned whether the deaf community might not be more appropriately viewed as a subculture—see, e.g., Turner 1994. Similar questions can be raised regarding the Spanish deaf community.

3. For early work on the topic see, e.g., Stokoe [1960] 1978; and Stokoe, Casterline, and Croneberg 1965. For more recent work see, e.g., studies in Siple 1978, 1990-1991. For Spanish Sign Language, see Rodríguez González 1992.

4. The matter is further complicated by the fact that one can be both a member of the deaf community and a member of another minority group. To borrow the words of an anonymous reviewer for the University of California Press, deaf people "form a solidarity [that crosscuts] ... other solidarities: e.g., a person may be deaf, a Catalan, a feminist, a banker, and a Catholic simultaneously and share subcultural traits with other members of those groups."

5. Pinedo Peydró 1989b, 70.

6. Ley de normalización lingüística de Galicia (June 1983), cited in Siguan 1992, 89.

7. The authors of one work ask, "If a deaf person possesses very few or no significant symbols (i.e., no words [or signs] as such), no formal signing system, how does his/her mental experience of the world differ greatly from chimps or dogs who also lack a language? Mightn't he primarily inhabit the Umwelt (environment of physical objects which have no socially shared meaning/definitions) of all other animals but not the Welt (symbolic world of social objects) of man?" (Evans and Falk 1986, 6). On the infirmity model and some of its consequences, see Lane 1992.

8. Ramírez Camacho speaks of the "expressive limitation of signs," while Ciges maintains that they "will always be impoverished and insufficient" (Ramírez Camacho 1982, 106; M. Ciges, preface to Ramírez Camacho 1982, 9); Suriá mistakenly asserts that "ideas cannot be expressed nor understood with gestures" (Suriá 1982, 40). Evans and Falk write, "Were we to put signs on a continuum of language ability, it is toward the lowest end where we would place them regardless of how well done,'' adding that ''when either [speech or hearing] is absent, the formation of 'mind' as we commonly think of it is rendered extremely problematic," and "to us, the manual signing of language is a type of deprivation" whose use " may deprive one of thought at its most abstract levels" (Evans and Falk 1986, 35, 22, 26).

9. E.g., see Poizner, Klima, and Bellugi 1987.

10. Located in the outskirts of Madrid on the Carretera de Vicálvaro, this establishment is Spain's largest public deaf school and the direct descendant of the Royal School for Deaf-Mutes, which first opened in 1805. Although recently threatened with closure as a result of the educational policy of "integración," the school remains open at this writing. When I conducted my research there in the late 1980s, all the instructors were hearing save one, Gustavo Angel Lorca, the art teacher.

11. According to Lourdes Gómez Monterde, who recently left her post as technical advisor to the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture for a teaching position at the Centro Público de Educación Especial de Sordos, the school's present administration is deeply interested in pedagogical reform, including a bilingual approach to deaf education that would use both Castilian and Spanish Sign Language (Lourdes Gómez Monterde, personal communication, September 17, 1996).

12. Lane 1984, foreword, xiii-xiv.

13. The count duke of Olivares (1587-1645), prime minister to Felipe IV, quoted in Siguan 1992, 25.

14. The statute for the Basque Country was not proclaimed until the end of the republic, and it was in effect for only a few months, until the region was occupied by the so-called Nationalist Movement. Galicia was incorporated at the onset of the war into the territory controlled by the fascists; consequently, the value of its statute was largely symbolic.

15. The information concerning public telephones was provided to me by my friend and colleague Eduardo Dias, who found himself in Barcelona in 1949.

16. The point is made in Siguan 1992, 70.

17. Constitución española, 1978, Titular preliminar, Art. 1-3.

18. Spain's present-day situation stands in sharp contrast with that of the United States. Although neither the U.S. constitution nor any law establishes English as the official national language, "English only" advocates, motivated in part by the recent influx of Hispanic and Asian immigrants, lobby for a constitutional amendment that would make English the sole official language of the United States. In November 1986 voters in my home state of California passed a constitutional amendment making English the official language of the state and instructing the legislature to "take all steps necessary to ensure that the role of English as the common language of the State of California is preserved and enhanced."

19. In the autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, and Valencia, Catalan is an official language. In the Basque Country and in part of Navarre, Euskera, or Basque, has official language status, as does Galician in Galicia. The statutes of three other communities, Asturias, Aragon, and Andalusia, also contain articles referring to linguistic particularities of their communities, but in these areas the sole official language is Castilian. In the Valley of Aran, which forms part of the autonomous community of Catalonia, Aranese enjoys a special status—see the text below.

20. In the Basque Country and Navarre, children have the right to primary instruction in the language of their choice.

21. That 55 percent of the inhabitants say they are able to speak Aranese is reported in a 1986 survey by T. Climent, Realitat lingüística a la Val d'Arán (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Institut de Sociolingüística Catalana, 1986), and cited in Siguan 1992, 265. Siguan attributes the population figures to "the latest census" (Siguan 1992, 265). The valley is situated in the Pyrenees on the border between Spain and France, and the survival of its language is due to its isolation; until the relatively recent opening of the Viella tunnel, the area was completely cut off from the rest of Spain, with which it sustained regular communication only during the summer months.

22. Deaf people in Spain are not counted in the official census, nor are users of Spanish Sign Language. According to Spain's National Confederation of the Deaf, there are some 120,000 deaf people in Spain today, and of these, 10,000 are affiliated with deaf associations. The confederation assumes that members of this latter group are users of Spanish Sign Language (these figures were kindly provided to me by Ana María Marroquín González). Oliver Sacks, noting that deafness affects about one one-thousandth of the population, estimates that in Spain there are some 40,000 congenitally deaf people (Sacks 1994, iii). In 1992 the Ministry of Social Affairs put the number of Spaniards with some kind of serious hearing limitation at 929,325; 118,953 of them were completely deaf, 365,225 were deaf in one ear, and 531,573 had serious difficulties in following a conversation without a hearing aid (figures from the Instituto Nacional de Servicios Sociales, supplied by Marroquín González).

23. A recent work on Spanish deaf history by Gloria González Moll is a case in point. I agree with this author's observation that "the history of deaf people is a question of perspective and as long as we do not use the appropriate perspective, the deaf person will continue to be a 'marginalized being,'" but her point of view nevertheless differs significantly from the one adopted here. While affirming her belief in the value of human diversity ("el valor de la diferencia ... aplicado a cualquier tipo de ciudadano"), she compares deaf people not to other linguistic minorities, but to individuals who are blind, dyslexic, marginalized ("sea ciego, sordo, disléxico, marginado''), thus evoking the familiar infirmity model of deafness (González Moll 1992, 21). González Moll's book did not come to my attention until my own research had been completed.

1. E.g., see Arboleda de los enfermos y admiraçion operum dey, written by the Spanish nun Teresa de Cartagena during the second half of the fifteenth century. Unlike Francisco and Pedro de Velasco, who were deaf from birth, the author lost her hearing during her youth, after she had learned to speak, but nevertheless she was sent to the convent. She wrote of the isolation deafness caused, even within her family: "Health forsakes us, friends forget us, relatives become cross, and even one's own mother becomes angry at her sick daughter, and one's own father abhors the child who with continual suffering had disturbed the home" (Teresa de Cartagena 1967, tratado I, 63).

2. According to Saint Augustine, "We acknowledge, indeed, how much pertains to our own transgressions: from what source of culpability does it come that innocent ones deserve to be born sometimes blind, sometimes deaf, which defect, indeed, hinders faith itself, by the witness of the Apostle, who says, 'Faith comes by hearing' (Rom. X, 17). Now, truly, what bears out the assertion that the soul of the 'innocent' is in the image of God, inasmuch as the liberation of the one born foolish is by his rich gift, if not that the bad merited by the parents is transmitted to the children?" (Augustine Traditio catholica [Migne, Opera omnia, vol. 10, bk. 3, ch. 4, line 10], cited in Bender 1970, 27).

3. The office of constable was established by King John I of Castile in 1382. The constable was of royal birth, served as captain-general of the army, and when the need arose, took the place of the king himself. In 1473 King Henry IV bestowed the title on Pedro Fernández de Velasco, count of Haro, not of royal birth; the position became hereditary in the Velasco family. Pedro's son and successor, who had been created duke of Frías, died without issue, and the title passed to his brother Iñigo, who had two sons, Pedro, the fourth constable of Castile, and Juan, the marquis of Berlanga by marriage and father of the deaf brothers Francisco and Pedro de Velasco.

4. Juan de Velasco and Juana Enríquez de Rivera were both descendents of the almirantes of Castile, and Juana Enríquez was related to the Portocarreros, another noble family in which hereditary deafness was frequent. Juana Enríquez de Rivera was Juan de Velasco's second wife, both marriages having required papal dispensation on account of consanguinity. Eguiluz Angoitia states that this second marriage produced at least nine children (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 168), while Ibarrondo places the number at seven (Ibarrondo 1934, 7). The hearing children included Inés (married Jerónimo de Zúñiga y Acevedo, fourth count of Monterrey; two of their children were deaf), Isabel (married Antonio Manrique de Mendoza, fourth count of Castrojerez), Iñigo, fifth constable of Castile, fourth duke of Frías, and sixth count of Haro (married his cousin María Girón y Velasco; they had a deaf daughter, Juana Mencia de Tovar). Besides the deaf siblings Francisco, Pedro, Juliana, and Bernardina de Velasco, another deaf sister, Juana, is mentioned only in the Relación del Monasterio de Oña (Archives of the duke of Frías, Montemayor, Cordoba, leg. 90 5 bis, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 257). Another deaf sibling, a "Doña Catalina de Velasco, mute, nun of the convent of Santa Cruz de Medina," is listed in the Compendio genealógico de la noble casa de Velasco (44v, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 247), but Eguiluz Angoitia states that neither the version he consulted (Archivo de la Historia, Col. Salazar, B-87, 43r-5r) nor other documents on the Velasco family refer to Doña Catalina (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 193 n. 32).

5. The speculations are those of Eguiluz Angoitia (1986, 170), who observes that the brothers may have been sent to the monastery shortly after their father's death in 1545.

6. This account was provided by Baltasar de Zúñiga, chronicler of the house of Monterrey and nephew of the deaf brothers Francisco and Pedro de Velasco (Baltasar de Zúñiga, Sumario de la descendencia de los condes de Monterrey, BN, ms 13,319, fol. 137v-138r, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 19).

7. According to Gregorio Argaiz, a monk at the monastery at Oña ( La soledad laureada [Madrid, 1674], 6:524, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 55. Argaiz gave no source for this information.

8. Piferrer, Nobiliario de los reinos y señores de España, vol. 1, cited in Farrar 1890, 21 n. 2.

9. Romualdo Escalona confirms that Ponce was a native of Sahagún (Escalona, Historia del real monasterio de Sahagún [Madrid, 1782], 206, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 58). Eguiluz places his date of birth somewhere between 1508 and 1512 (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 56).

10. Ponce entered San Benito el Real on November 3, 1526, according to Escalona (cited in ibid). Ponce's name first appears on the list of monks attending meetings at Oña in 1533 (Valladolid, Chancillería, Pleitos civiles [F], La Puerta, leg. 92, carp. 458; Quevedo, leg. 135, carp. 4,326-1, fol. 126v-29r; AHN, Clero, leg. 1,200 and 1,300, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 68). He spent the following year at Sahagún (Valladolid, Chancillería, Pleitos civiles [F], Masas, carp. 634-3; Varela, carp. 357-3; Quevedo, carp. 1,488-2, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 72), then returned once again to Oña in 1536.

11. Baltasar de Zúñiga, Sumario de la descendencia, BN, ms 13,319, fols. 137-138, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 234. According to this same author, who was the nephew of Ponce's students Francisco and Pedro de Velasco, Ponce was a man without higher education ("sin letras fundadas"), which undercuts the claim that Ponce attended the University of Salamanca ( Reseña histórica de la Universidad de Salamanca, 1849, 43, cited in Farrar 1890, 21), made by Davila and Ruiz and repeated by Lane 1984, 91.

12. The hypothesis that Ponce was illegitimate, set forth in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 16-24, and throughout his 1974 work, is picked up by Dídimo Fresno Rico 1978, 8. Eguiluz Angoitia (1986, 55-58) argues against Pérez de Urbel, to my mind unconvincingly. In Ponce's day much less stigma was attached to aristocratic bastards than we would expect from our twentieth-century point of view. The best known may be Don Juan de Austria, bastard son of Charles V and half brother of King Philip II, who forged a brilliant military career.

13. Preguntas para el pleito criminal con Diego de Pereda, AHN, Clero, leg. 1,222, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 49.

14. Escalona, Historia del real monasterio, 206, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 56, and 62 n. 21. In contrast, Escalona referred to Fray Facundo de Torres as the "son of the most noble and distinguished parents that there were at that time in this town" (Escalona, Historia del real monasterio, 209, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 56). On pages 207, 208, 210, 218, 219, and 222 Escalona also included references to monks descended from distinguished families (ibid., cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 56 n. 21) but did not mention Ponce's parents by name. On these grounds, Eguiluz Angoitia discounts the claim that Ponce's father and grandfather were noblemen and contends that since there were many descendents of the Ponce de León family in the region of Sahagún, not all of whom were economically or socially powerful, Escalona's mission might show only that Ponce was of humble birth (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 58). Despite lack of documention on Ponce's father, Pérez de Urbel (1973, 21-24, 1974, 320-322) proposes Juan Ponce de León, seeker of the fountain of youth in the New, World. Born about a league from Sahagún in Santervás, where the monastery had a priory, the young Juan Ponce de León served as a page in the court of Ferdinand, the Catholic monarch, before leaving with Ovando for the New World in 1502. After he returned to Spain, to prepared for the conquest of Florida, which he attempted in 1515. Pérez de Urbel places Juan Ponce in Spain from 1512 to 1514, calculating that if Pedro Ponce was between twelve and fourteen years old when he entered Sahagún in 1526, he must have been born between 1513 and 1514, the period during which Juan was in Spain. Eguiluz Angoitia is not impressed by these chronological and topographical coincidences. He observes that according to their constitution, the Benedictines did not admit boys younger than sixteen to the novitiate, leading him to calculate that when Ponce entered the monastery in 1526, he was at least fourteen to sixteen years old. If so, our monk was born not between 1513 and 1514, as Pérez de Urbel suggests, but rather between 1508 and 1512. Eguiluz cites documents showing that Juan Ponce de León did not return to Spain until April 1514 and concludes that whoever Pedro Ponce's father was, it could not have been Juan Ponce de León (Archivo General de Indias, Contratación 4.674, II Libro Manual del tesoro Matienzo, fol. 48v, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 56).

15. J. B. Guardiola, a monk at Sahagún, wrote that Ponce, "although he was never an abbot, well deserves to be counted among the illustrious men of [Sahagún], since he was so humble that he refused to accept any office" (J. B. Guardiola, Historia del Monasterio de San Benito el Real de Sahagún, BN, ms 2,243, fol. 203, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 40 n. 3). Noting that the monk was apparently absent from Oña for three periods of three years each (1543-1545, 1564-1566, 1574-1576), Eguiluz Angoitia (1986, 79-80) conjectures that Ponce might have been appointed prior of Nuestra Señora la Vieja during his absences from Oña, pointing to a cryptic note found among the documentation of Oña that lists the names of various monks together with those of various priories and includes the notation, "N[ues]tra. S[eño]ra. la Vieja, fray Pedro Ponce." Needless to say, this claim amounts to nothing more than the sheerest speculation.

In support of his hypothesis that Ponce was illegitimate, Pérez de Urbel cites the monk's transfer from Sahagún to Oña. When he pronounced the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, like all Benedictines Ponce also made a fourth vow, to remain at the monastery of his profession for life. But Fray Pedro broke this fourth vow when he left Sahagún for San Salvador at Oña, leading Pérez de Urbel to argue that the reason for his transfer might have been found in the town of Sahagún itself, home to many of Ponce's relatives. Tensions between a powerful family and an illegitimate child, this author suggests, may well have caused Fray Pedro to abandon the monastery of his profession—see Pérez de Urbel 1973, 16-18. If so, it may be that familial difficulties were shared by both the monk and the deaf children he would come to teach. Pérez de Urbel's suggestion that the circumstances of his birth might explain Ponce's move to Oña is disputed, however, by Eguiluz Angoitia, who argues—to my mind, plausibly—that various other reasons could explain the transfer (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 68, 71-72).

Pérez de Urbel (1973, 24) also interprets Ponce's custom of signing his name as "Pedro Ponce," rather than "Pedro Ponce de León," as "repugnance for using the complete name of Ponce de León," hence, a possible indication of illegitimacy. But Eguiluz Angoitia argues that Ponce was merely following the custom of the day, in which using one surname or two was common. Moreover, on formal occasions, Ponce did indeed sign both last names. E.g., n the document of foundation and endowment of the chaplaincy to be established at Ponce's death, he referred to himself as "Fray Pedro Ponze de Leon" (AHN, Clero, leg. 1,306, Escritura de donación al monasterio de los censos, August 20, 1584, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 52).

16. According to Molinoeus, a French jurist of the early sixteenth century, "one born deaf and dumb is entirely undisciplinable—or unamenable to education" (cited in Farrar 1890, 14). Similarly, the jurist Alexander de Imola maintained that those deaf from birth could under no circumstances be taught to speak, or even to write (Alexander de Imola, Prima et secunda super codice, s.l., 1529, fol. 112r; P. de Castro, Secunda super codice, s.l., 1527, fol. 39r-v, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 39).

17. In the fifth century B.C. Greek Hippocratic physicians, observing that those born deaf were invariably mute, hypothesized that the two conditions were inevitably linked. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D. ) also maintained that deafness and muteness were of necessity inseparable, as did the Greek physician Galen (130?-201? A.D. ). In his Oratio de surditate et mutitate (Muremberg, 1591) the German physician Salomon Alberti first refuted the claim, but it continued to be commonly held until the nineteenth century.

18. The Jesuit philologist and anthropologist Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro writing in 1795, may have been the first to observe that in many languages, deaf-mutes, that is, those who were either born deaf or who lost their hearing at such as early age as to preclude the acquisition (or retention) of speech, are designated by their inability to speak, not their inability to hear (Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:1:3-5, 4-5 n. 1).

19. Harlan Lane (1984, 427 n. 88) provides various translations of the passage in question, Aristotle's History of Animals, bk. 4, ch. 9, section 8: "Those who are born deaf all become speechless. They have a voice but are destitute of speech" (T. Arnold, Education of Deaf-Mutes, a Manual for Teachers [London: Wertheimer and Lea, 1888], 5); "All that are born dumb and all children utter sounds but have no language" (trans. R. Creswell [London, Bell, 1891]); "Men that are deaf are in all cases also dumb; that is, they can make vocal sounds but they cannot speak" (trans. D. W. Thompson [Oxford, Clarendon, 1910]). Ruth E. Bender (1970, 20-21, quoting from The Works of Aristotle, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, trans. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908-1952], vol. 4, bk. 4, no. 9) reproduces the following passage: ''Viviparous quadrupeds utter vocal sounds of different kinds, but they have no power of converse. In fact, this power, or language, is peculiar to man. For while the capability of talking implies the capability of uttering sounds, the converse does not hold good. Men that are deaf are in all cases also dumb; that is, they make vocal sounds, but they cannot speak.''

20. According to Aristotle, "Of the senses which are subservient to the necessities of life, the sight is more excellent and per se; but the hearing is more excellent incidentally with reference to the intellect. For sight announces ... but the hearing only announces the differences of sound. But, incidentally, hearing greatly contributes to wisdom; for discourse, which is audible, is the cause of discipline (i.e., education), not essentially, but incidentally, for it is composed of names, and every name is a symbol. Hence among those who from their birth are deprived of each of these senses, the blind are more intelligent than deaf-mutes" ( Of Sense and Sensibiles, c. I, quoted in Farrar 1890, 7).

21. Thus, Kenneth W. Hodgson (1953, 62) attributes to Aristotle the statement, "Those who are born deaf all become senseless and incapable of reason." Bender (1970, 21) repeats the explanation of Harvey Peet (1851a, 134) that the Greek kophoi "deaf" and eneos "speechless'' could also mean ''dumb" and "stupid." To illustrate other ideas discussed here, a work published in Spain in 1540 affirmed that speech was characteristic of man and of no other animal, that animals had voice but not speech, and that speech was conceived in the soul, which was lacking in animals (Pedro Mexía, Silva de varia lección, Seville, 1540, cited in Alvaro López Núñez's edition of Licenciado Lasso [1550] 1919, 116-117 n. 40). And the idea that speech was an instinct was expressed in a 1550 treatise on the legal rights of deaf-mutes written at Oña (Lasso [1550] 1919, 34); the latter work is discussed in the text below.

22. On Saint Augustine, see note 2 above.

23. We need not assume that Augustine was referring to deaf people: his acquaintance with a deaf youth who communicated solely by means of signs led him to observe elsewhere that it mattered not whether a person spoke or signed, since "both of these pertain to the soul" (Augustine, De quantitate animae liber unus, ch. 18, quoted in Edward Allen Fay, "What Did St. Augustine Say?" Annals 57 [January 1912]: 119, cited in Van Cleve and Crouch 1989, 6). If signs, like speech, pertain to the soul, then signs too should be effective for communication, and it would follow that deaf people could learn and achieve salvation.

24. Real Academia de la Historia 1807, vol. 3, partida IV, ley V, 14. The legal rights of deaf persons who could speak and those who were also mute are discussed in partidas 4-7. Alfonso X (1221-1284) was king of Castile and Leon.

25. Rodolphi Phrisii Agricolae (1443-1485), De inventione dialectica, 1557, cited in Bender 1970, 32. The first edition was published in 1521.

26. Juan Luis Vives 1963 (1538), 88. (The English translation of this chapter was kindly provided by my friend and teacher George Voyt). As we saw, Aristotle at no point stated that those unable to hear could not learn, and that Vives made this assumption demonstrates how Aristotle's remarks had come to be misinterpreted.

27. Vives 1963 (1538), 91.

28. Vives, Tratado del alma, Madrid, La Lectura, n.d., 130, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 39.

29. Vives certainly took this to be true of animals: "The lack of reason [in animals] manifests itself ... in their lack of speech: if they had such an internal rational guide, they would lack nothing to enable them to speak.... In man vocal sounds are the sign of the entire soul, of fantasy, of affect, of intelligence and of the will; in animals, they are only the sign of their instincts" (Vives, Tratado del alma, 110, 130-131, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 28 n. 11).

30. Girolamo Cardano (1502-1576), Italian physician, philosopher, and mathematician.

31. According to Cardano, "Concerning Deaf and Dumb taught letters Georgius Agricola refers, in his third book of Inventione dialectica to having seen a man born deaf and dumb, who learned to read and write, so that he could express what he wished. Thus we can accomplish that a mute hear by reading and speak by writing. For by thinking his memory understands that bread, for example, means that thing which is eaten. He thus reads, by reason, even as in a picture; for by this means, although nothing is referred to voices, nor only things, but actions and results are made known, and as from a picture the meaning of another picture is formed, so that by reason it may be understood, so also in letters" (Girolamo Cardano, Quo continentur opuscula miscellanea ... Paralipomenis, , 1663, cited in Bender 1970, 32).

32. Cardano's Paralipomenis, believed to have been written between 1562 and 1571, was still unpublished at his death in 1576, if the instructions the author included in his will are to be believed (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 143). In an earlier work, published in 1550, Cardano had also referred in passing to the possibility of teaching a deaf person. First advocating that those who lose their hearing after acquiring speech should be taught to read and write, he suggested this possibility even for those who were deaf from birth ( De utilitate ex adversis capienda, bk. 2, ch. 7, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 143). But Ponce's teaching of Francisco and Pedro de Velasco was already well under way by the time this work was published (as observed in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 144).

33. As noted by Pérez de Urbel, three of the monks at Oña had been procuradores in Rome during the first half of the sixteenth century, the abbot had earned a doctorate in Bologna, and another monk, who also held a doctorate from Bologna, had traveled throughout Italy and Flanders and participated in the Council of Trent (Pérez de Urbel 1973, 67).

34. The suggestion that El Mudo's example might have inspired Ponce to undertake the instruction of his deaf pupils appears in Peet 1851a, 140. The idea seems unfounded, however—as argued in the text below.

Juan Fernández Navarrete died in 1579. Although various dates have been suggested for his birth, Ruiz-Fischler appears to have located his birth certificate, which lists it as September 24, 1540 (entry for Juan Fernández, Libro primero de bautizados desde el 18 de octubre de 1538 hasta el 1569, Logroño, cited in Ruiz-Fischler 1989, 72). Hans Werner claims that there existed in Ponce's day "a whole series of deaf-mutes who were trained to read and write" (Werner 1932, 187). The claim is by no means well documented, however, and one visitor to Oña, the Licenciado Lasso, repeated the belief, apparently common at the time, that deaf people could not be taught to write, citing the authority of "all the ancient scholars" (Lasso [1550] 1919, 38). We must conclude that there was not "a whole series" of literate deaf-mutes, for if there had been, Lasso most likely would have known of their existence and would have modified his views accordingly.

35. Authors do not agree on how old Navarrete was when he lost his hearing, but a sculptor who knew the artist personally testified that he had become deaf at age two and a half ("Memorial de Juan Fernández Navarrete, con parte de una información," testimony of Pompeo Leoni, September 5, 1578, cited in Roque Domínguez Barruete, Boletín de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones [Valladolid, 1904], cited in Ibarrondo 1929, 70).

36. Fernández Navarrete is known as the Spanish Titian but probably never studied with the Italian master; his name appears on none of the lists of Titian's disciples ( Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1924], 22:798, s.v. "Juan Fernández de Navarrete, 'El Mudo'").

37. This testimony to his skills comes from the king's chaplain, Hernando Descobar, in "Memorial de Juan Fernández Navarrete, con parte de una información," in Domínguez Barruete, Bolletín, cited in Ibarrondo 1929, 71.

38. Ibid., cited in Ibarrondo 1929, 70.

39. Luis Hurtado's testimony appears in the Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes en España, ed. Cea Bermúdez (Madrid, 1880), cited in Ibarrondo 1929, 69. Hurtado further related that El Mudo confessed three times in the half hour before his death.

40. Alejo de Venegas, Tractado de orthographia y accentos en las tres lenguas principales (Toledo, 1531), parte 3 a, Reg. XIII, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 29; Juan Luis Vives, De subventione pauperum, Lyons, 1532, fol. 49v, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 29.

41. The early Christian founders of monasteries had without exception imposed silence on their disciples. The prohibition of speech may have been introduced for the first time in 328 by Saint Pachomius at the monastery he founded on an island in the upper Nile. This same prohibition eventually appeared in the religious orders of the West as well, among them, the Order of Saint Benedict and those arising from it—the Cluniacs, the Cistercians, and the Trappists. For historical background on monastic sign language, see, e.g., Van Rijnberk 1954, Buyssens 1956, and Barakat 1987.

42. Antonio Yepes, Crónica general de la orden de San Benito (Salamanca, 1607), 300, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 45 n. 52. The fifteenth century Liber cerimoniarum monasterii sancti Benedictini Vallisolentani described 360 signs that must have been used at Oña by Francisco and Pedro de Velasco, Pedro Ponce, and their fellow religious, for the codex contains notes written and signed by monks who entered the monastery of San Salvador between 1577 and 1581 (Bejarano y Sánchez 1905, 20). The first known list of monastic signs had been drawn up in 1068 by a monk named Bernard of Cluny, and it contained 296 entries—a clear indication that the signs had been in use for some time before Bernard recorded them.

43. E.g., see Schlesinger and Meadow 1972.

44. E.g., see Goldin-Meadow and Feldman 1977.

45. Yepes, Crónica general, 300-303, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 60, 157.

46. In another exchange more than two hundred years later, the abbé Roch-Ambroise Sicard taught his native French to Jean Massieu, his deaf pupil, and Massieu in turn taught his signs to Sicard: "Thus by a happy exchange Massieu taught me the signs of his language and I taught him the signs of mine," wrote Sicard (quoted in Lane 1984, 13).The deaf Frenchman Laurence Clerc and the American Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet shared a similar experience when, on a voyage from France to the U.S. that led to the establishment of the first deaf school in North America, each instructed the other in his native tongue, French Sign Language and English, respectively.

47. For further discussion and a description of Cistercian monastic signs, see Barakat 1987.

48. In Barakat's (1987) study of monastic signs used by Cistercians at St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, monks invented unauthorized or so-called "useless" signs, which supplemented the officially sanctioned signs, a move that was necessary to meet their communicative needs. Significantly, unauthorized signs far outnumbered official ones at the time of Barakat's study (Barakat 1987, 92).

49. Indeed, this very thought had occurred to another member of a signing order, the twelfth-century Cistercian mystic William, abbot of St. Thierry, who held that reason, the distinctively human trait, could make itself known either by speech or by signs. It would follow, then, that voice and articulation were nonessential human functions, since signs, as well as writing, could convey our thoughts (William of St. Thierry, De natura corporis et animae, vol. 180, cols. 713-714, in Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, ed. Jacques Paul Migne [Paris, 1844-1864], cited in O'Neill 1980, 129-130).

50. One historiographer referred to silence as that "thing so characteristic of the Order of Saint Jerome" (José de Sigüenza [1600] 1907, 251). So closely was silence associated with the religious life that this author, writing in 1600, asserts, "I hold it impossible that there can be [any] religion that in truth and in reason deserves this name, if it does not glory in the observance of silence" (252). During this period signs were used in many monasteries throughout Europe, but (as far as I have been able to determine) the monks of Saint Jerome did not record a vocabulary of signs in use in their order, in contrast to the Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Cluniacs, and the Trappists. This in no way implies that signs were not employed, and during periods of obligatory silence it seems most probable that they were.

51. The tale of "El Licenciado Vidriera," first published in Madrid in 1613 by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), Spain's most famous writer and the author of Don Quixote, features a monk who could make mutes "understand and in a certain fashion speak"—along with curing the insane (Cervantes Saavedra 1978, 147). Cervantes's monk, like Vicente de Santo Domingo, belonged to the Order of Saint Jerome, perhaps suggesting that the allusion was to Fray Vicente. If so, the hypothesis that Vicente de Santo Domingo taught more than drawing may find support in Cervantes's tale. Nevertheless, various authors have suggested that the allusion was to Pedro Ponce—C. and R. T. Guyot among them (their Liste littéraire philocophe [1842], is cited in Farrar 1890, 32). Farrar takes issue with the Guyots, observing that the monk in Cervantes's story belongs to the Order of St. Jerome. (According to Farrar, the monastery was located a few leagues from Valladolid, while Ponce's was in Oña—and Santo Domingo's was in Logroño. The story of "El Licenciado Vidriera" is set mainly in Valladolid, but I found no reference to the location of the monastery.) Farrar concludes, "It may ... well be that Cervantes has veiled under fictitious terms what he may have known of Ponce de León'' (Farrar 1890, 33).

Bejarano claims that the reference to the monk who taught deaf people demonstrates that Cervantes was aware of Ponce's work (Bejarano y Sánchez 1905, 10-11), while Tomás Navarro Tomás suggests that the reference might be to someone who continued it (Navarro Tomás 1924, 239). As I have already suggested, I believe instead that Cervantes may have had in mind one whose teaching preceded Ponce's, namely, Vicente de Santo Domingo.

The oft-repeated claim that Ponce was the first to teach deaf students was challenged more than 150 years ago by Ferdinand Berthier, who wrote that several isolated attempts at deaf education, which he situated both in France and elsewhere, antedated Ponce's teaching; according to this same author, a Germany contemporary of Ponce, Joachim Pascha (1527-1578), educated two of his own deaf children (Berthier [1840], in Lane 1984, 169).

52. Indeed, according to Werner, the teaching of speech was "the only new factor[,] since deaf-mutes who could read and write were not rare at that time" (Werner 1932, 260 n. 1). The claim is open to dispute, however (see note 34).

53. This was the reaction of the Licenciado Lasso, a jurist from Madrid who, after witnessing Ponce's teaching and meeting Francisco and Pedro de Velasco, wrote a treatise on the legal rights of deaf-mutes, as discussed in the text below (Lasso [1550] 1919, 10).

54. AHN, Consejos, leg. 35,090, Memorial del pleito de don Francisco María, Osuna, leg. 4,136 n. 127 ss, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 163.

55. Testament of Juan de Velasco, cited in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 45.

56. Assuming, following Eguiluz Angoitia (1986, 170), that the brothers most likely entered the monasteryat Oña around 1547. Juan de Velasco's petition to the emperor was approved in 1543.

57. In 1560 the right to succession of the deaf and mute Juan Portocarrero, eldest son of the second marquis of Villanueva del Fresno, was contested by a hearing brother. Similarly, in the following century, the right to succession of the deaf and mute Alonso Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa, eldest son of the fifth marquis de Priego, was called into dispute, once again by a hearing brother. Both deaf heirs fended off their challengers. The case of Juan Portocarrero is discussed in Eguiluz Angoitia 1836, 113; that of Alonso Fernández de Córdoba is related in Ballesteros 1836, xii.

58. Lasso himself states his profession as jurisprudence (Lasso [1550] 1919, 29), although some authors, for instance Domingo Vaca and Bejarano y Sánchez, have mistakenly maintained that he was a monk at the monastery at Oña (Vaca 1901, 73; Bejarano y Sánchez 1905, 16). The claim is repeated more recently in Lane 1984, 428 n. 97.

59. Lasso [1550] 1919, 16. Successive page references in the text are to López Núñez's 1919 edition of Lasso 1550.

60. Lasso's view was shared by others of his day, for instance, Antonio Yepes, chronicler of the Benedictine Order, who wrote that Ponce's ability to teach deaf people "was a gift that heaven conceded to him ... but it was not the grace to perform miracles that is called gratis datas, but rather, he really had such great inventiveness and such great talent, that he discovered a method to make the mutes talk" (Yepes, Crónica, cited in Werner 1932, 245 n. 1).

61. Ponce's words appeared in a document dated August 24, 1578, and first published by another Benedictine monk, Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, in the mid-eighteenth century (Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta VII, párrafo 17, 88).

62. The work was apparently in final form and ready for publication, including even a list of authors. Why it was not published in Lasso's time is not clear. The title Tratado legal sobre los mudos, 'Legal treatise on mutes,' was added in the eighteenth century by the Spanish Royal Library. Although the manuscript remained unpublished until the early twentieth century, Miguel Fernández Villabrille referred to it in 1883 (M. Fernández Villabrille 1883, 9), and a brief description occurred in all 1888 work (Bartolomé José Gallardo, Ensayo de una biblioteca de libros raros y curiosos, formado con los apuntamientos de D. Bartolomé José Gallardo [Madrid, 1888], 3:299-300 to 311-312, cited in Lasso [1550] 1919, xvii-xviii). The treatise remained in manuscript form, however, until 1916, when it was first published by Faustino Barberá Martí ( Tratado legal sobre los mudos, por el Licenciado Lasso. Año 1550 . Manuscrito inédito de la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, copiado y dado a luz en 1916 por el Dr. D. Faustino Barberá Martí [Valencia: Revista Valenciana de Ciencias Médicas, 1916]). Three years later a second version was published by López Núñez (Lasso [1550] 1919). Lasso's original manuscript call be found in Madrid in the Biblioteca Nacional, ms 6,330.

63. Lasso attributed the distinction between "significant voice" and "non-significant voice" to the historian Alonso de Palencia, noting that all the Latin authors had agreed that birds and animals "have voices," that is, they are capable of producing sounds, but only man has "significant voice,'' that is, only man is capable of speech (ibid., 86).

64. The Compendio genealógico of the house of Velasco states that Francisco died in childhood, but the date of his passing is not recorded (Compendio genealógico, 44, v., reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 246). The statement also occurs in the Relación y advertencias de mi señora la Marquesa de Berlanga, Doña Juana, Enríquez de Ribera y de su linaje y del Mayorazgo que dejó y fundó, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 260. Eguiluz Angoitia speculates that Francisco entered the monastery around 1547, when he was about eleven years old (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 170). If Eguiluz's calculations are correct, by the time his uncle Iñigo died in 1559, Francisco would have been twenty-three—hardly a child. In all probability, Francisco's life had ended before 1559.

65. Bejarano's assertion that thanks to Ponce's teaching, Francisco Tovar was able to succeed to and administer a marquisate would seem to be mistaken (Bejarano y Sánchez 1905, 8).

66. Documentation of the house of Velasco, written sometime after 1627 and containing reminiscences of times past, states that Pedro was ordained a priest: "It is had for a sure thing that he was ordained by disposition of His Holiness, because he could not hear, and Luis de Zarauz, long-time servant of the constable of Castile Juan Fernández de Velasco, affirmed that he used to help him in the mass many times" ( Relación y advertencias de ... la Marquesa de Berlanga, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 261). Other documentation refers to Pedro de Velasco as "clergyman of the diocese of Burgos" (Chancillería de Valladolid, Pleitos civiles [F], Alonso Rodríguez, leg. 721, carp. 411-3, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 176). Although Lasso wrote in his treatise that both brothers could pronounce clearly the words required for the transubstantiation and were therefore qualified to celebrate mass, he made no mention of Pedro actually being a priest. Thus, he must have been ordained sometime after Lasso's visit to Oña.

67. Relación y advertencias de ... la Marquesa de Berlanga, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 261.

68. Ambrosio de Morales, Antigüedades de las ciudades de España (Alcalá de Henares: Juan Iñiguez de Lequerica, 1575), 28, c, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 243.

69. Baltasar de Zúñiga, Sumario de la descendencia, BN, ms 13,319, fols. 137-138, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 235. Zúñiga's remarks on Don Pedro's speech suggest that Lasso exaggerated somewhat when he referred to the "clarity and perfection" of the brothers' pronounciation and when he claimed that they spoke "in fact really like we [hearing people] do" (Lasso [1550] 1919, 24, 95).

70. Compendio genealógico, 44, v, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel, 1973, 247. According to Pedro's nephew, Baltasar de Zúñiga, his uncle was more than thirty years old when he died (Baltasar de Zúñiga, Sumario de la descendencia, BN, ms 13,319, fols. 137-138, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 234); as Pérez de Urbel observes, this seems a reasonable estimate, considering that when Lasso was at Oña in 1550, Pedro had already learned to speak and to sing plainchant and so must have been around ten or twelve years old. Ambrosio de Morales wrote that Pedro "lived little more than twenty years," however (Morales, Antiguëdades, cited in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 98), and the Relación del Monasterio de Oña states that Pedro died at age twenty-one (Archives of the duke of Frías at Montemayor, Cordoba, leg. 90 5 bis, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 257).

71. Testamento de don Pedro de Velasco, AHN, Clero, leg. 1,311, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 85-87.

72. Baltasar de Zúñiga (Sumario de la descendencia, BN, ms 13,319, 138v, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 188) puts the number of Ponce's students at ten or twelve. Morales ( Antigüedades, 28, c, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 243) mentions that Ponce taught a deaf sister of Francisco and Pedro Velasco.

73. Letter from Juan de Idiáquez, secretary to Phillip II, regarding Gaspar's petition to the pope to be allowed to marry his first cousin ( Miscelánea, BN, ms 1,761, 125r-129r, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 186).

74. Yepes, Crónica, 255-256, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 181; ibid., fol. 428v, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 30. Tradition has it that Gaspar de Burgos entered the monastery intending to become an hermano lego (lay brother) but because he was deaf and mute, he was told that he could only aspire to become a donado perpetuo (another variety of lay brother, apparently of lower rank), or a servant. Ponce supposedly undertook to instruct him because he was displeased with the situation, and as the story goes, thanks to the monk's teaching, Gaspar de Burgos was able to profess his vows as a monk (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 159-160).

75. The reference seems to exemplify the belief, erroneously attributed to Aristotle once again, that deaf people were ineducable. Ponce's words appeared in a document dated August 24, 1578, and first published by Feijóo y Montenegro (1759, vol. 4, carta 7, párrafo 17, 88).

76. Perhaps some of Ponce's students also came from society's humbler classes, for which reason their names were not recorded (see Fresno Rico 1971, 133).

77. Francisco Vallés, De sacra philosophia liber singularis (Turin: Augustoe Taurinor, 1578), ch.3, 71, cited in Ibarrondo 1929, 27-28. Subsequent editions appeared in Lyons (1588, 1592, 1623), Frankfurt (1590, 1608), and London (1562).

78. Morales, Antigüedades, 28, c, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 243.

79. Baltasar de Zúñiga, Sumario de la descendencia, BN, ms 13,319, fol. 139r, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 277.

80. Written testimony of Pedro Tovar, cited by Morales, Antigüedades, 29, c, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 239-240.

81. Juan de Castañiza, Aprobación de la Regla y orden del gloriosissimo padre Sant Benito ... con un Catálogo de Principes eclesiasticos y seglares, de doctores y sanctos sin cuento (Salamanca, 1538), 40-41, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 204.

82. Ponce's manuscript has been the object of great interest and numerous searches. In the mid-eighteenth century Feijóo y Montenegro, having requested information concerning Ponce, received various documents from the monastery at Oña, but the work on teaching deaf students was not among them. The manuscript must have still existed, however, because in 1821 Bartolomé José Gallardo, librarian and archivist of the Spanish Cortes, had his friend Manuel Flores Calderón make a copy of it—which was later lost. (The original was at that time housed in a monastery in Burgos.) In 1839 Gallardo distributed to the Spanish parliament a catalogue of titles of rare works that included one by Pedro Ponce de León, and this rekindled the hope of locating the manuscript. Inquiries instigated around this time by the French Baron Degerando proved futile, as did the efforts of Carlos Nebreda y López, director of the Madrid deaf school, who tried to locate it some thirty years later. Most recently Eguiluz Angoitia, after an exhaustive search, was led to conclude that the original has been lost, probably as a result of the disentailment of 1836 (see Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, especially 216-223). Credit for unearthing the manuscript page attributed to Ponce goes to Eguiluz Angoitia, who provides a detailed description of its contents and physical appearance, along with a reproduction of the original (AHN, Clero, leg. 1,319, in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 223-227).

83. The manual alphabet used by Ponce seems to have resembled the two-handed alphabet employed in Great Britain today, rather than the one-handed alphabet described by Melchor Yebra (in Libro llamado Refugium infirmorum, muy útil y provechoso para todo género de gente . . . con un Alfabeto de San Buenaventura para hablar por la mano [Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1593)]. Yebra's alphabet, which was apparently widely known in Ponce's day, appears with only slight modification in Juan Pablo Bonet's book (1620), as discussed in the following chapter.

84. Manuscript page attributed to Pedro Ponce, reproduced in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 225-226.

85. We are reminded of the situation that existed for several centuries on Martha's Vineyard—see Groce 1985.

86. Escritura de donación de fray Pedro Ponce al monasterio, 20 agosto 1584, AHN, Clero, leg. 1,306, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 158.

87. Baltasar de Zúñiga, Sumario de la descendencia, BN, ms 13,319, fol. 137v-138r, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 19; Lasso [1550] 1919, 23; Juan Benito Guardiola, Historia del Monasterio de San Benito el Real de Sahagún, BN, ms 2,243, fol. 203, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 40 n. 3; Pedro Ponce, document dated August 24, 1578, and cited in Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, párrafo 17, 88.

88. In 1546, 1549, 1550, 1553, 1556, and 1560 (AHN, Clero, leg. 1,192, 1,222, 1,228, 1,230, 1,236, 1,238, 1,241, 1,244, 1,281, 1,300, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 74).

89. Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 81. The majority of Ponce's loan contracts is located in AHN, Clero, leg. 1,165, 1,166, 1,203, 1,206, 1,222, 1,257, 1,295, 1,300, 1,301 (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 81).

90. Carta de poder a D. Alonso Díaz, dated September 1, 1580. AHN, Clero, leg. 1,205, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 84-85.

91. Ponce himself referred to possessions received from his disciples, as well as gifts and alms received for his services as executor of wills (Escritura de fundación de una capellanía y misas [24 agosto 1578)] in Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carte 7, párrafo 17, 88). Monks at the monastery of San Salvador were allowed to have their own monies, although these funds remained at the disposal of their superiors (AHN, Clero, leg. 1,205; E. Zaragoza Pascual, Los Generales de la Congregación de San Benito de Valladolid [Silos, 1980], 3:111, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 84). The monastery benefited greatly from gifts Ponce received from his students' families, such as his donation of jewels and valuables worth three thousand ducados, paid to him by the family of the constables of Castile for teaching Francisco and Pedro de Velasco. The gifts, including monies from redeemable rent charges, a silver lamp for the chapel, money for a shrine for the main altar, candlesticks, a cross, four silver bells, silver crowns for the statue of the Christ Child and Mary, and several silver bowls, are catalogued in the Memoria de lo que el Exc.mo Sr. don Iñigo de Velasco y sus Hermanos dejaron en Oña al Padre Pedro Ponce, sacada del libro de Bienechores (Archives of the duke of Frías at Montemayor, Cordoba, leg. 90 5 bis, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 258). Ponce also paid the salary of a physician employed to treat his sick brethren and provided medicines (Argáiz, La soledad laudeada, 4:524, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 270).

92. Eguiluz documents another activity as well: in 1555 Ponce was appointed along with several other monks to visit three hospitals in Oña (AHN, Clero, leg. 1,310, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 78-79).

93. Escritura de dotación, AHN, Clero, leg. 1,306, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 73-74.

94. Argaiz, La soledad laureada, 6:524, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 270.

95. Fray Juan de Castañiza, Historia de San Benito (Salamanca: 1583), 288, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 245-246. Morales, Antigüedades, 28, c, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 242-243. Pérez de Urbel places the date of Morales's stay at Oña around 1560-1565 (ibid., 97).

96. Vallés, De sacra philosophia liber singularis (Turin, 1587), ch. 3, 71, cited in Ibarrondo 1929, 27-28. Vallés expressed a very enlightened view of sign language: "What else is speech, if not by way of certain slight movements of the tongue to signify things in accord with what is agreed upon with the interlocutor? Certainly, what some are wont to do, especially the mutes, is no different . . . when they express their thoughts to each other mutually by way of different movements of the fingers (Vallés, De sacra philosophia, sive de iis quae in libris sacris physice scripta sunt [Lyons, 1652], 51, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 35). It seems possible that Vallés acquired this perspective at Oña, where deaf disciples and monks alike conversed in signs.

97. But see note 76 above.

98. Partida de un libro antiguo de difuntos, reproduced in Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, primera adición, párrafo 16, 87.

99. Stated by Antonio Pérez (1559-1637), a Benedictine monk who professed his vows in 1578 and was sent to Oña to study philosophy, in first censor's approval (Pérez, Censura del Reverendísimo Padre Maestro fray Antonio Pérez Abbad del monasterio de San Martín de Madrid de la orden de San Benito, in Bonet 1620, n.p.).

1. Navarro Tomás suggests that some members of religious orders must have continued Ponce's work after he died, speculating that one of them was the abbot of Rute, another, the Franciscan Fray Michael de Arblán (Navarro Tomás 1924, 239). Yet eight years after Ponce died, the duke of Monterrey, related by marriage to the Velasco family, apparently did not search out a teacher for his sons, both deaf and mute, which may suggest that Ponce had no successors. Because of his muteness, the elder son could not inherit all of his father's entailed estates. It was recorded that "the grief which the Duke suffered when he saw that his eldest son was dumb, was all the greater since he must have learnt that his estate, which ... consisted of several mayoralties, would be divided, the deaf-mute son being able to take over only some of them as his inheritance. He approached leading scholars in order to discover a way of avoiding this partition, using his astute mind to formulate great plans for overcoming this misfortune. But no solution could be found which would not discriminate against either the elder or younger son. Therefore the Duke and Duchess ordered many prayers to be said in the hope of averting this misfortune" (Baltasar de Zúñiga, Sumario de la descendencia de los condes de Monterrey, fol. 139r, cited in Werner 1932, 247-248).

2. According to Werner, Alonso Fernández de Córdoba's family produced, in addition to their deaf offspring, "a large number of generally unviable children" (Werner 1931, 217).

3. Juana Enríquez de Rivera y Cortés (1534-1649) was the daughter of the third duke of Alcalá de los Gazules. Pedro Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa V (1563-1606) was the fourth marquis of Priego, second marquis of Villafranca, and first marquis of Montalbán. Francisco Fernández de Béthencourt observes that Don Pedro, like his maternal grandfather, suffered from poor health, and for this reason he lived a reclusive life on his estates at Montilla (Bethencourt 1905, 205).

4. Alonso's aunt, Ana Ponce de León, was sent to the nuns of Santa Clara in Montilla, and his sister, Ana Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa, was sent to the convent of the Madre de Dios in Baena.

5. Juana Enríquez de Rivera y Girón, 1584-1649.

6. Three died in infancy and six more in childhood. One of the daughters, Josefa Fernández de Córdoba, would marry Iñigo Melchor de Velasco, the son of Bernardino de Velasco, seventh constable of Castile and the nephew of Bernardino's deaf brother Luis, discussed in this chapter.

7. Manuel Ramírez de Carrión, 1579-1650.

8. José Pellicer [de Tovar], Obras varias, BN, ms 2,236, II, fol. 39, cited in Navarro Tomás, 1924, 239. De Carrión himself stated that his first student was Alonso Fernández de Córdoba, the marquis of Priego (in preface to Maravillas de Naturaleza [Montilla: Juan Bautista de Morales, 1629], reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, ix). If the first student had been of humble birth, this might explain de Carrión's failure to mention him.

9. De Carrión, preface to Maravillas, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, ix. Juan de Velasco, sixth constable of Castile, had died in 1613.

10. Luis Fernández de Velasco had been born in 1610. According to Juan Pablo Bonet, secretary to the Velasco household, the boy had been born hearing but had become deaf at the age of two (Bonet [1620] 1930, 27), while according to a genealogy of the house of Velasco, he was deaf from birth (Compendio genealógico de la noble casa de Velasco, Biblioteca de la Academia de la Historia, Colección Salazar, ms B-87, fol. 63v, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 245 n. 2). An Englishman who met Luis when the boy was in his thirteenth year also stated that he had been born deaf (Digby 1645, 307).

11. Bonet [1620] 1930, 27.

12. The third and youngest child, a hearing daughter, Mariana Fernández de Velasco, would later reside in the royal palace, where she entered the service of Isabel de Borbón, wife of Philip IV.

13. Francisco and Pedro de Velasco's nephew, Baltazar de Zúñiga, was also among those who entreated Ramírez to teach Luis de Velasco (Pellicer, Obras varias, BN, ms 2,236, fols. 36-37, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 242).

14. Bernardino had been born in 1609.

15. De Carrión, preface to Maravillas, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, xi.

16. Official approval and permission to publish the book was granted that same year (Navarro Tomás 1924, 252).

17. Juan Bautista de Morales, Pronunciaciones generales de lenguas, ortografía, escuela de leer y contar y significación de letras por la mano, Montilla: Juan Bautista de Morales, 1623. The book is dedicated to Alonso Fernández de Córdoba y Figueroa, the fifth marquis of Priego.

18. Antonio Nebrija, Tratado de ortografía (Madrid, 1735), 24-25, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 120; on other authors who advocated this same procedure, see 121.

19. Juan Bautista de Morales, Pronunciaciones generales de lenguas, ortografía, escuela de leer, escribir y contar y significación de letras en la mano (Montilla: Juan Bautista de Morales, 1623), 28, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 303.

20. Melchor Yebra (1526-1586) was a Spanish Franciscan whose book was published posthumously (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1593). The complete title was Libro llamado Refugium infirmorum, muy útil y provechoso para todo género de gente, en el cual se contienen muchos avisos espirituales para socorro de los afligidos enfermos, y para ayudar a bien morir a los que están en lo último de su vida; con un alfabeto de San buenaventura para hablar por la mano (Book called refuge of the sick, very useful and beneficial for all kinds of people, in which is contained much spiritual advice for assistance of distressed sick persons, and for helping those who are at the end of their lives to die well; with Saint Bonaventure's alphabet to speak by the hand).

21. As Yebra wrote, the alphabet might have helped a man no longer able to speak who died ''with anguish in his soul" because, although he knew the finger letters and by this means tried to make his needs known, neither the priest called to hear his confession nor any of those present were able to understand him (Yebra, Refugium infirmorum, fols. 172v-173r, cited in Ivars 1920, 10).

22. In the seventh century in his Ecclesiastical History the Venerable Bede, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine, had described a system for representing the letters of the alphabet with the fingers ( The History of the Church of England, trans. T. Stapleton [Antwerp: Laet, 1565], bk. 5, ch. ii, cited in Lane 1984, 68), and in 1579 Cosme Rosselio published a manual alphabet in Italy (Cosme Rossellio, Thesaurus artificiosa memoria [Venice: 1579], cited in Bejarano y Sánchez 1905, 25). Bejarano attributes the reference to Rosselio to an "erudite note" left by the former director of Spain's National School for the Deaf, Miguel Fernández Villabrille. It will be recalled that Ponce's students had also used a hand alphabet.

23. Yebra, Refugium infirmorum, fol. 173v, cited in Andrés Ivars 1920, 10. Because the reference here was unequivocally to deaf people who had lost their hearing after having acquired spoken language, Werner's claim that "this account ... shows that deaf-mutes who could make themselves understood by means of a sophisticated hand alphabet were in no way uncommon" cannot be maintained (Werner 1932, 377-378).

24. De Carrión, preface to Maravillas, fols. vii-viii, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 248.

25. Juan Pablo Bonet (1579-1633) was born in Torres de Berrellén (formerly Torres de Castellar), in what is today the province of Zaragoza. His parents, Juan Pablo and María Bonet, were prominent old Christian hidalgos, and his maternal uncle, Pedro Bonet, was secretary to the Inquisition in Zaragoza.

26. By some accounts, Bonet held a doctorate from the University of Salamanca (Granell y Forcadell 1929a, 442; Martínez Medrano 1982, 183).

27. Bonet [1620] 1930, 27.

28. Pellicer, Obras varias, BN, ms 2,236, fols. 36-37, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 242-243.

29. Bonet [1620] 1930, 27. Successive page references in the text are to Orellana Garrido and Gascón Portero's 1930 edition of Bonet 1620.

30. Bonet referred to "mutes ... who from the movements of the lips of those who speak to them understand much of what is said to them" at another point in the book as well (ibid., 37). On Bonet's remarks about teachers who took credit for their pupils' lipreading abilities see note 117. For early documented accounts of deaf-mutes who could lip-read see Van Cleve and Crouch 1989, 8, 17. José Miguel Alea, writing in 1795, referred to "many deaf-mutes" without formal education who could lip-read and follow the gist of a conversation but by no means make out every word (Alea 1795, 357, 358).

31. Bonet's remark undercuts claims that he taught "by means of sign language" (Lane 1984, 86) and "advocated the use of manual communication" (Winefield 1987, 5).

32. On this occasion Kenelm Digby met the illustrious teacher and his pupil Luis de Velasco. Navarro Tomás speculates that this was most likely the last trip de Carrión made to Madrid to complete Luis's instruction (Navarro Tomás 1924, 243).

33. Manuel Ramírez de Carrión, Maravillas de naturaleza, en que se contienen dos mil secretos de cosas naturales, dispuestos por abecedario a modo de aforismos fáciles y breves, de mucha curiosidad y propecho, recogidos de la lección de diversos y graves autores (Montilla: Juan Bautista de Morales, 1629). The book was published in 1629 both in Montilla, by de Carrión's friend Juan Bautista de Morales, and in Cordoba, by Francisco García (Navarro Tomás 1924, 246-247). Nicolás Antonio believed that there existed an earlier edition, published in Madrid in 1622 (Antonio [1672] 1783-1788, 1:354), and Andrés Morell, apparently on the authority of Antonio, also mentioned a 1622 edition (Andrés Morell 1794, 18).

34. The principal authors cited include Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Avicenna, Columella, and Saint Isidore, as well as de Carrión's contemporaries Andrés Laguna, Vicente Espinel, and Sebastián de Covarrubias.

35. De Carrión, Maravillas, fols. 1, 3, 8, 45, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 246.

36. Ibid., preface, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, ix-x.

37. De Carrión, preface, Maravillas, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, x-xi. The Order of Alcántara had been founded in mid-twelfth century as a religious and military organization to fight against the Moors; it had been secularized by this time. Members were required to prove that they descended from at least four generations of nobles, and that their forebears included neither Jews nor Moors.

38. Ibid., fols. 127-129, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 249.

39. De Castro was born in Bayona—perhaps the Bayona close to Madrid or the one in Galicia, rather than the French Bayonne—and died in 1661. Based on his last name, Hervás y Panduro concluded that he was in all probability a Spaniard (Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:311-313).

40. Pedro de Castro, La commare di Scipione Mercurio, accresciuta d'un trattato del colostro dell'eccellentis sig. Pietro di Castro medico fisico avignonense (Venice, 1:676), 4, punt. 3, 335, cited in Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:38-39. The deaf child de Castro was supposed to have taught reportedly came to speak perfectly after two months (Felipe Jaime Sachs de Lezvenheimb, Miscellanea medico-physica academiae naturae curiosorum, sive emphemeridum medico-physicarum germanicarum annus primus MDCLXX [Leipzig, 1670], 4, observatio 3, 5, 112, cited in Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:40). Various authors have claimed that de Castro instructed the prince of Carignan as well (e.g., Nebreda y López 1870b, 15, M. Fernández Villabrille 1883, 11, Bejarano y Sánchez 1903, 13), but this appears to be a confusion with Ramírez de Carrión, to whorn de Castro himself attributed the prince's instruction (de Castro, La commare di Scipione Mercurio, 4, punt. 3, 335, cited in Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:38).

41. Sachs, Miscellanea medico-physica, 4, observatio 35, 112, cited in Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:40-41.

42. Sachs, Miscellanea wedico-physica, 4. observatio 35, 112, cited in Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:41.

43. Around 1578 Antonio Pérez (1559-1637) came to Oña from Silos, where he had entered the Benedictine Order, Years later, when he was abbot of San Martín in Madrid, the Royal Council solicited his evaluation of Bonct's book. Pérez approved it, noting that natives and foreigners had honored Ponce for his miraculous inventiveness but that he had trained no successors, for which reason "this work seems to me very worthy of publication" (Pérez, Censura del Reverendísimo Padre Maestro, in Bonet 1620, n.p.).

44. Romualdo Escalona, Historia del real monasterio de Sahagún (Madrid, 1782), bk.7, ch. 2, 206, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 286-287; Antonio [1672] 1783-1788, 1:354, 754-755, and 2:228; Feijóo y, Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, párrafo 9, 86. Eguiluz Angoitia argues that Police's manuscript, the students' notebooks, and so on, most likely, remained in the monastery at Oña until the nineteenth Century, and if so, neither Bonet nor Ramírez could have consulted them (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 309). Navarro Tomás points out that Bonet could not have merely published Ponce's manuscript in its original form, for the majority of the works he cites were published after Ponce's death; interestingly enough, almost all these books were in the library of the sixth constable of Castile, Juan Fernández de Velasco (Navarro Tomá 1920-1921, 34).

45. Thus it seems that Lane's claim (1984, 91) that Bonet was "the source of [Ramírez de Carrión's] method" cannot be sustained.

46. Navarro Tomás conjectures that others continued Ponce's teaching after the monk's death (see note 1) and that de Carrión could have learned the procedures from one of these successors, but the evidence he presents is extremely weak.

47. Lane Speculates that to orchestrate Luis's instruction, his parents, the sixth constable of Castile and the duchess of Frías, would have consulted older family relatives and perhaps even obtained Ponce's manuscript from the monastery at Oña, then hired Ramírez de Carrión to implement Ponce's method (Lane 1984, 93). But Bonet's procedures do not seem consistent with what is known of Ponce's approach.

48. Manuscript attributed to Pedro Ponce, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 2.25.

49. Bonet [1620] 1930, 117.

50. Juan Bautista de Morales, Pronunciaciones generales de lenguas, ortografía, escuela de leer, escribir y contar y significación de letras en la mano (Montilla: Juan Bautista de Morales, 1623), 28, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 303.

51. Eguiluz Angoitia speculates that Ponce might have used this phonic approach, for the pedagogy was known in his day, and the technique appeared in the primer used to teach reading to Iñigo de Velasco, fifth constable of Castile and brother of Ponce's deaf students Pedro and Francisco (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 261). The primer in question is Juan de Robles's Cartilla menor para enseñar a leer en romance (Berlanga, n.d.), cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 261. Eguiluz also observes that Ponce may have been acquainted with Antonio Venegas's Tractado de orthographia (Toledo, 1531); this work contains detailed descriptions of the articulation of the sounds corresponding to each letter (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 261).

52. According to Pedro Tovar, cited in Ambrosio Morales, Antigüedades de las ciudades de España (Alcalá de Henares: Juan Iñiguez de Lequerica, 1575), 29, c, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 240.

53. Francisco Vallés, De sacra philosophia (Lyons, 1652), 53, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 254.

54. Bonet compares the deaf pupil at this point to "those who read Latin very well, but do not understand it" (Bonet [1620] 1930, 142).

55. A. Rodríguez Villa, Etiquetas de la casa de Austria (Madrid), 21, cited in Navarro Tomás 1920-1921, 28 n. z.

56. Into Bonet's trunk and suitcase went apparel and personal effects that included a green suit decorated with black and green trim and a satin waistcoat with silver braid and black fringe, another suit trimmed in green and adorned with gold scalloped lace, with matching stockings and garters, a suit of cloth from Segovia with a short cloak, doublet and breeches, trimmed with dark brown buttons, complete with a coordinated dark brown satin waiscoat with braid, black satin laced breeches decorated with ornate braid, six hats, ten pairs of shoes, two pairs of boots, two hundred fifty gold escudos, two gold chains, a watch on a narrow ribbon that dangled from a diamond brooch, a diamond ring, another with rubies and another without stones, two hundred fifty enameled gold buttons, two silver candlesticks, a silver spoon, goblet, and salt and pepper shakers, three shotguns, and other belongings ("Relación de los bestidos, xoyas, i otras cossas que yo Juan Pablo llevo a Roma para el servicio de mi persona," 1621, AGS, Cámara de Castilla, leg. 1,116, f. 27, cited in Navarro Tomás 1920-1921, 37).

57. The order was founded in the twelfth century as a military order to protect pilgrims journeying to Santiago de Compostela against the Moors. When Ferdinand and Isabel brought it under the jurisdiction of the crown, the title of Knight of Santiago became purely honorific.

58. A paper Bonet wrote at this time presented Spain's position in a dispute with France, while obliquely revealing the author's considerable knowledge of the international intrigues and political maneuvers of his day (Juan Pablo Bonet, Discurso acerca de la conveniencia o disconventencia de la embajada que llevaban a Roma los señores Obispo de Córdoba y don Juan Chumacero y materias que habían de tratar, BN, ms 18,434, last ten folios, cited in Navarro Tomás 1920-1921, 29-30).

59. This account occurs in Pellicer, Obras varias, BN, ms 2,236,fols. 36-37, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 243. Ramírez apparently made his last journey to the Velasco home in 1623; the duchess of Frías, who had expended so much effort on her son's behalf, died the following year.

60. De Carrión, preface, Maravillas, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, ix-x.

61. Compendio genealógico de la noble casa de Velasco, Biblioteca de la Academia de la Historia, Colección Salazar, ms B-87, fol. 63v, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 245 n. z.

62. José Pellicery Tovar Justificación de la grandeza y cobertura de primera clase del marqués de Priego (Madrid: 1649), fol. 41v, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 241-242 n. 3. Grandees of the first class were primarily descendants of those created by Charles I, among them, the marquis of Priego.

63. Fernández de Córdoba, abbot of Rute, stated that the marquis of Priego communicated in writing (Historia de la casa de Córdoba, BN, ms 3,271, fol. 151, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 241 n. 2); that he also communicated in signs has been noted in the text above and documented in note 62.

64. The Order of the Golden Fleece was founded in 1429 by Philip the Good, the duke of Borgoña, to protect the Christian religion. Only persons of noble birth could be elected to its ranks.

65. Ballesteros 1836, xii.

66. Béthencourt 1905, 6:210.

67. F. Llamas y Aguilar, Arbol genealógico de la casa de Priego, 1667, BN, ms 18, 126, fol. 51v, cited in Werner 1932, 273 n. 2.

68. Emmanuele Filiberto Amadeus II (1628-1709) was deaf from birth (his younger siblings—five brothers and two sisters—were all hearing). When Philip IV sent for Ramírez de Carrión, the prince was around eight years of age.

69. The suggestion is made in Farrar 1890, 43, and repeated in Lane 1984, 88. Duke Thomas was general of the Spanish armies from 1635 to 1640.

70. José Pellicer de Tovar, preface to Pirámide baptismal de doña María Teresa Bibiana de Austria, Madrid, October 26, 1638, reproduced in Audrés Morell 1794, i. Pellicer de Tovar (1602-1679), also referred to as Pellicer y Tovar Abarca, was a prolific writer and chronicler of the realm.

71. Ibid., ii-iv.

72. Later from the prince of Carignan, September 14, 1645 (Turin, Archivio di Stato, Savoia, principi di Carignano, G.77, cited in Werner 1932, 289-290 n. 1).

73. To judge by a letter from Miguel Ramírez written in Montilla and dated May 18, 1660 (Turin, Archivio di Stato, lettere particolari R.4, cited in Werner 1932, 290 n. 1).

74. Letter from Emmanuele Filiberto Amadeus to Count Melchior Buneo, Compiègne, June 10, 1649 (Turin, Archivio di Stato, Savoia, principi di Carignano, G.77, cited in Werner 1932, 291 n. 1).

75. Lane 1984, 427 u. 78.

76. Louis de Rouvroy, duke of Saint-Simon, Mémoires (1694-1723), in T. Denis, ''L'instituteur du prince de Carignan," Revue française de l'éducation des sourds-muets 3 (1887): 197-204, cited in Lane 1984, 89. The passage is also quoted in Werner 1932, 286-287.

77. Louis de Rouvroy, duke of Saint-Simon, Mémoires (1694-1723), in T. Denis, "L'instituteur du prince dc Carignan," Revue française de l'éducation des sourds-muets 3 (1887): 197-204, cited in Lane 1984, 89. The passage is also quoted in Werner 1932, 287 (his translation is slightly different). Despite Saint-Simon's claim that the prince could "grasp everything from the movements of the lips and a few gestures," Jean Frèzet states that although he "learned not only to read and write, but even to comprehend the most abstract ideas ... it was not possible to speak to his eyes except by signs" (Frézet 1827, 3:645).

78. Bonet [1620] 1930, 27.

79. De Carrión, preface, Maravillas, reproduced in Andrés Moréll 1794, ix. There has been no lack of confusion surrounding Ramírez de Carrión on other questions as well. A contemporary, Mateo Velázquez, while recognizing that Bonet was the author of the book on how to teach deaf people to speak, had heard it said that Luis de Velasco's teacher was "a foreigner" (Velázquez, El filósofo del aldea [Zaragoza, n.d.], fol. 5, cited in Werner 1932, 2.62 n. 1). And the Bibliographie universelle would have it that de Carrión was himself a deafmute (Paris, 1824, 37:49, cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 238-239 n. z), a story repeated widely in Spain, France, and the United States. Hervás y Panduro referred to him as a physician (Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:42), and this was in turn repeated by Faustino Barberá (1911, 348).

80. Partida de un libro antiguo de difuntos, reproduced in Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, primera adición, 87.

81. Authors referring to Ponce after his death include the Jesuit Juan de Torres ( Filosofia moral de príncipes [Burgos, 1598]), the chronicler Baltasar de Zúñiga (Sumario de la descendencia, written at the beginning of the seventeenth century), and the Benedictines Juan de Castañiza ( Aprobación de la reglay orden del gloriosissimo padre Sant Benito [Salamanca, 1583]), Antonio Yepes ( Crónica general de la orden de San Benito [Salamanca, 1607]), Gregorio Argaiz ( Soledad laureada [Madrid, 1675]), Feijóo y Montenegro (1730, 1759), and Romualdo Escalona ( Historia del real monasterio de Sahagún [Madrid, 1782]). Antonio Pérez, the abbot who mentioned Pedro Ponce when bestowing his approval on Bonet's book, was also a Benedictine (see note 43). At the end of the eighteenth century two Jesuits, Juan Andrés Morcll and Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, would attempt to revive the memory of Pedro Ponce, as discussed in the next chapter.

82. Lope de Vega, in the verses printed at the beginning of Bonet's book, as well as in the dedication of his play Jorge Toledano (Madrid 1622) and in a rhyming letter published in La circe (Madrid 1624); Juan Pérez de Montalbán in Para todos (Seville, 1645, 7th cd., fol. 199); Pedro Díaz Morante in his Arte de escribir (Madrid, 1624, part two, fol. 4) and in Enseñanza de príncipes (Madrid, 1624, fol. 5); Caramuel in his Apparatus philosophicus (Cologne, 1665, 11-12); López de Zárate and Constantino Susias in the epigrams that appear at the beginning of Bonet's book (references cited in Navarro Tomás 1924, 227 n. 1, and in Werner 1932, 312-313).

83. Some thirty years later, Nicolás Antonio would write that de Carrión "Without a doubt ... invented the art, or surely in his era he alone practiced it, teaching mutes the use of writing and in a certain manner speech" (Antonio [1672] 1783-1788, 1:354) but Antonio was aware (2:228) that Ponce had practiced the teaching too.

84. Pellicer de Tovar, preface to Pirámide baptismal, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, ii, v. In this same work, Pellicer made it clear that he had not forgotten about Pedro Ponce. He opined that Ponce "began [the teaching] with efficacy, but it is not said that he completed it with perfection. Your Grace achieved the feat with considerably more brilliant success in the house of the most excellent Don Bernardino Fernández de Velasco, constable of Castile, who is alive today, than did that monk in the [house] of his grandfathers" (ibid., iv).

85. Velázquez, El filósofo del aldea, fol. 5, cited in Werner 1932, 2.62 n. 1.

86. Pellicer obtained documentation from the duchess of Frías, Luis's brother the constable, the archbishop of Burgos, the president of Castlie, the count of Salazar, and Baltasar de Zúñiga,chronicler of the house of Velasco (Pellicer de Tovar, preface to Pirámide baptismal, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, vi).

87. Luis de Velasco noted that he had also seen de Carrión teach Juan Alonso de Medina and Don Antonio de Ocampo y Benavides, mutes who were at that time living in Seville and Zamora, respectively (ibid., reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, vii).

88. Ibid.

89. Ibid., vii-viii.

90. Pérez de Urbel suggests (1973, 149-150) this turn of events may have been due to deaths and changes among the princes of the house of Savoy, alluded to by Pellicer himself, or conceivably to a lack of gratitude on the part of Emmanuele Filiberto's mother, the princess of' Carignan. Though Andrés Morell reproduced Pellicer's dedication to Ramírez de Carrion when he published the Pirámide baptismal in Austria and Italy in 1793 and in Spain in 1794, even this did not suffice to clarify; the situation, for he referred to de Carrión as having practiced the teaching of deaf people "after" Bonet—a conclusion he may have arrived at based on the respective dates of publication of Bonet's 1620 Arte and Ramírez de Carrión's 1613 Maravillas (Andrés Morell 1794, 53). Andrés wrote (18 n) that he had received the dedication, in which José Pellicer attributed to de Carrión "the glory of the invention," from his friend Eugenio de Llaguno Amirola after having completed his own work-which may explain why he did not revise the remarks about de Carrión.

91. Digby 1645, 307-309. The comments on the impossibility of teaching lipreading are perfectly consistent with Bonet's opinion. About Luis's speaking abilities Digby noted (308): "It is true, one great misbecomingnesse he was apt to fall into, whiles he spoke: which was an uncertainty in the tone of his voyce; for not hearing the sound he made when he spoke, he could not steddily governe the pitch of his voyce; but it would be sometimes higher, sometimes lower; though for the most part, what he delivered together, he ended in the same key as he begun it. But when he had once suffered the passage of his voice to close, at the opening them againe, chance, or the measure of his earnestnesse to speake or to reply, gave him his tone: which he was not capable of moderating by such an artifice."

92. Ibid., 308.

93. Pedro de Castro had also mentioned the prince of Carignan as one of Ramírez de Carrión's disciples (de Castro, La commare di Scipione Mercurio, 4, punt. 3,335, cited in Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:38).

94. Although this is not the place to document this confusion in full detail, suffice it to say that it persisted for centuries. As already noted, Andrés Morell took Ramírez to have practiced the teaching "after" Bonet (see note 90). Hervás y Panduro also seemed to infer that Ramírez de Carrión was a successor of Bonet (Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:309-310), an opinion that was echoed by Harvey Peet when he referred to Bonet (as well as Ponce) as "predecessors" of Ramírez (Peet 1851a, 156). At mid-nineteenth century an article by Luis María Ramírez las Casas-Dezas might have clarified the situation (Ramírez y las Casas Deza 1852), but apparently it attracted little attention, for more than fifty years later Eloy Bejarano y Sánchez still called Ramírez de Carrión an "emulator" of Bonet (Bejarano y Sánchez 1905, 35). Ramírez y las Casas-Deza's work was reprinted in 1991, and thirteen years later Tomás Navarro Tomás published an article (Navarro Tomás 1924) that, according to one author, "shed an unexpected light upon the whole matter'' (Werner 1932, 263). Navarro Tomás's research contains much information originally published by Ramírez y las Casas-Deza, but Navarro Tomás does not mention his predecessor.

95. Rodrigo Moyano, Memorial, Madrid, Archivo de las Cortes, Cortes de Castilla, Acuerdos, leg. 4, libro 3 (1317-23), cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 174. News of Moyano was first brought to light by Eguiluz (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 274-276).

96. Actas de las cortes de Castilla (Madrid, 1912), 35:226-27; 37:546; Seris, H., Guía de nuevos temas de literatura española (Madrid, 1973), 106-109, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 276. Eguiluz speculates that Bonet knew of Moyano's claim that he could teach students to lip-read and aimed to refute it with his disparaging remarks about teachers who took credit for their pupils' lipreading skills (Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 275).

97. Considering that Miguel was already teaching the prince of Carignan in 1645, he would have been a very old man by the beginning of the 1700s. Information concerning Diego Ramírez is scarce and the few references I have found are often contradictory. Alea, citing José Pellicer's Idea de Cataluña, stated that Diego was the son of Manuel Remírez Carrión [ sic ], and that "in 1709 he was teaching Sor Josefa de Guzmán, Franciscan nun of the house of Medina Sidonia, and deaf from birth, as is recorded in the archives of the duke of Medina Sidonia." According to Alea, these same archives also contained documents revealing that Diego received a pension of twenty-four reales a day for his teaching. The author attributed this information to Santiago Sáez, "king-at-arms of his Catholic Majesty, a person of exquisite erudition, a friend of long standing of the aforementioned house of Medina-Sidonia, and at present a resident of this court [i.c., Madrid]" (Alea 1795, 287). Details of Alea's version are repeated—without attribution—by Vicente de la Fuente and by Miguel Fernández Villabrille (Fuente 1885, 2:516; M. Fernández Villabrille 1883, 11). But Ballesteros states that Diego Ramírez de Carrión was the son of Miguel and grandson of Manuel (Ballesteros 1833-1835, 1:61), and Ibarrondo claims that it was Miguel Ramírez, not Diego, who taught Josefa de Guzmán (Ibarrondo 1934, 8). Eguiluz Angoitia (1986, 316 n. 22) repeats Ibarrondo's claim, which he attributes to both this writer (1934, 7-8) and (incorrectly) to Fernández Villabrille (1883, 11), as well as to Osorio Gullón (L. Osorio Gullón, "Estudio evolutivo de la legislación española en favor de los sordomudos," in Revista española de subnormalidad, invalidez y epilepsia 3 [1972]: 100, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 316 n. 22).

98. Barberá 1889, 30. Fenollet, according to Barberá, died in the convent of Santo Domingo in Valencia.

99. Nevertheless, Julio Bernaldo de Quiros and Fany S. Gueler report that in 1724 in Seville a Brother Toribio founded the Instituto de Niños Anormales y Defectuosos del Lenguaje (institute for abnormal children and those with speech defects) (Bernaldo de Quiros and Gueler 1966, 333). It is not clear that the teaching here involved deaf children, and at any rate the name these authors attribute to the school would hardly have been used in the early eighteenth century—which may cast doubt on the entire account.

1. Francisco Vallés, De sacra philosophia liber singularis (Turin, 1587), ch. 3. 71, cited in Ibarrondo 1929, 27-28. Antonio Yepes, Crónica general de la orden de San Benito (Salamanca, 1607), vol. 5, centuria sexta, 337, reproduced in Pérez de Urbel 1973, 248-249.

2. Emanuele Tesauro, Cannocchiale aristotelico (Turin, 1670), cited in Paul Julian Smith 1988, 72-73. For a list of further works with references to Ponce, Bonet, and Ramírez de Carrión, see Farrar 1890, 59-62.

3. Nicolás Antonio considered Ponce the inventor of the art that was later described by Bonet, but he contradicted himself when he also attributed the discovery to Ramírez de Carrión (Antonio [1671] 1783-1788, 1:354, 754-755, 2:228).

4. John Bulwer, Philocophus, or The Deaft and Dumbe Man's Friend (Loudon: Humphrey Moseley, 1648). Bulwer had already evidenced an interest in such topics before Digby's account reached print, for in 1644 he had published Chirologia, or the Natural Language of the Hand (London: Gent), in which he mentioned a deaf man whose wife communicated with him by indicating different joints of the fingers, each of which represented a letter of the alphabet.

5. John Wallis, Grammatica linguae Anglicanae cul praefigitur de loquela sive sonorum formationes (Oxford: Robinson, 1653), known also as De loquela .

6. William Holder, Elements of Speech, with an appendix concerning persons that are deaf and dumb (London: Martyn, 1669).

7. George Dalgarno, Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man's Tutor (Oxford: Timo. Halton, 1680).

8. Anthony Deusing, The Deaf and Dumb Man's Discourse, trans. George Sibscota (London: H. Bruges for W. Cook, 1670). Francis Van Helmont, Alphabeti vere naturalis Hebraici (Sulzbach: A. Lichtenthaleri, 1667).

9. Johann Conrad Amman, Surdus loquens (Amsterdam: Wetstenium, 1692); Surdus loquens sive dissertatio de loquela (Amsterdam: J. Wolters, 1700). An English translation of the first work, entitled The Talking Deaf Man, was published in London in 1694 by Hawkins.

10. Amman, Dissertatio de loquela, in an 1873 English translation, A Dissertation on Speech (reprint, Amsterdam: North Holland, 1965), 10, cited in Lane 1984, 100.

11. George Raphel, Die Kunst Taube und Stumme Reden zu Lehren (Lüneburg, 1718).

12. There may have been occasional instances of instruction, but they seem not to have come to the public notice. The efforts attributed to Father Antonio Fenollet during the seventeenth century and to Brother Turibio early in the eighteenth have been discussed above (see chapter 2, note 94 and text mention). According to Faustino Barberá (1889, 30), the Spanish physician Juan José Ignacio de Torres taught deaf people in Valencia and in Paris. This is most likely the same Torres who corresponded with Feijóo during the mid-1700s (see note 47 below).

13. Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro (1676-1764). His essays on a wide range of topics, written during the first half of the eighteenth century, attacked superstition and ignorance and popularized the ideas of experimental science. Although said to be the Spanish Voltaire and the father of the Spanish Enlightenment, Feijóo supported aristocratic privilege and the continuance of ecclesiastical intervention in the affairs of state.

14. Feijóo y Montenegro 1730, vol. 4, discurso 14, sección 24, párrafos 86, 88, 93, 413, 414, 415.

15. Ibid., párrafo 100, 417-418.

16. Ibid., párrafo 102, 418. Since Feijóo accused Bonet of plagiarizing Ponce, we understand why the remainder of Feijóo's description of the method he attributed to Ponce seems drawn from Bonet's Arte: "One begins by writing all the letters of the alphabet: subsequently [the pupils] are instructed in the proper articulation of each letter, showing them the inflection, movement, and position of the tongue, teeth, and lips, which said articulation requires; one proceeds next to the union of the letters with others to form words, et cetera" (párrafo 102, 418-419).

17. Ibid., párrafo 104, 419.

18. The source Feijóo cited was Trevoux's Mémoires (Paris, 1701) (Feijóo y Montenegro 1730, vol. 4, discurso 14, sección 24, párrafo 105, 419-420).

19. Jacobo Rodríguez Pereira (1715-1780), known in France as Pereire.

20. Letter from José Ignacio de Torres, cited in Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, segunda adición, párrafo 25, 91.

21. According to Lane, two deaf women inspired Pereira to devote his life to deaf education: his sister, and a woman with whom he fell in love while in France at the age of eighteen (Lane 1980, 131).

22. Buffon's words are reproduced in Edouard Séguin [1847] 1943, 23-28.

23. Memoir of the Academy of Science, cited in Abraham Farrar, Arnold's Education of the Deaf (London: Francis Carter, 1901), 33-34, cited in Scouten 1984, 47. Lane argues that the Pereira family, having fled numerous times in order to escape religious persecution and having even undergone bogus conversion to Christianity in Spain, had learned that the best way to survive was to try to be like the majority. Thus Pereira, according to Lane, spent much of his life ''giving hard-of-hearing pupils artificial speech so that their way of communicating would resemble the accepted way" (Lane 1984, 75). The academy's statement of Pereira's aim as enabling deaf people to "act like others" serves to underscore the correctness of Lane's assessment.

24. Quoted in Lane 1984, 80.

25. That Saboureux and Azy were not untaught when they met Pereira moves Lane to formulate "a cynical ... suggestion," namely, "the secret of success is to use other people's pupils." Furthermore, as Lane also observes, de Fontenay and another of Pereira's students, Marie Marois, were not actually deaf but only hard of hearing, which would have considerably facilitated their learning to speak (Lane 1984, 82).

26. Segundo informe de la Real Academia dc Ciencias, sesión de 27 de enero de 1751, cited in Granell y Forcadell 1905, 9.

27. Lane estimates the total number of deaf people instructed by Pereira at around six (Lane 1984, 6).

28. For an extract of the letter, see Saboureux dc Fontenay 1764, reproduced in ibid., 17-27. Séguin claims Saboureux taught more than one deaf person (Séguin [1847] 1943, 65). But another author puts the number at one, a woman in the city of Rennes (U. R. T. Lebouvier Desmortiers, Mémoire ou considerátions sur les sourds-muets de naissance [Paris, Buisson, 1800], cited in Lane 1984, 81-82).

29. E.g., see Fontenay 1764, reproduced in Lane 1984, 17-27, and Séguin [1847] 1943, Segunda parte, Análisis razonado del método de Pereira, 161-225.

30. By way of illustration, Lane suggests that Pereira might have had a hand shape for the single sound [s], which can be written in French as s ( soupe ), ç ( façon ), or ti ( nation ); the same position of the articulators corresponds to each pronunciation (Lane 1984, 82).

31. Jacobo Pereira, cited in Séguin [1847 ] 1943, 175.

32. Ibid., 188.

33. A linguist who met with the thirty-year-old Saboureux reported that he could detect "not a trace of his speech lessons" (L. Vaïsse, quoted in First International Congress of Deaf [1891], Compte-rendu: Congrès international des sourds-muets, ed. V. Chambellan [Paris: Association Amicale des Sourds-Muets de France, 1890], 478-479, cited in Lane 1984, 84). Lane notes that another of Pereira's students, Marie Marois, stopped using her speech as well (Lane 1984, 84).

34. Translation of Charles-Michel de l'Epée ( The True Manner of Instructing the Deaf and Dumb [Paris: Nyon, 1789], 121) cited in Scouten 1984, 69. De l'Epée (1712-1789) is known as "the father of the deaf." He was initially drawn to deaf education by the plight of two young deaf sisters whose instruction had been initiated by a Father Vanin but interrupted at his death. At the request of the girls' mother, de l'Epée undertook to teach them.

35. De l'Epée, cited in Lane 1984, 6-7.

36. Ibid., 7.

37. Letter from de l'Epée to Sicard, November 25, 1785, cited in Lane 1984, 213 n. 7.

38. Charles-Michel de l'Epée, La véritable manière d'instruire les sourds et muets, confirmée par une longue expérience (Paris: Nyon, 1784), 159, cited in Farrar 1890, 61.

39. Charles-Michel de l'Epée, Institution des sourds-muets par la voie des signes méthodiques (Paris: Nyon, 1776); La véritable manière d'instruire les sourds et muets (Paris, 1784).

40. Roch-Ambroise Sicard (1742-1822). In 1785 the archbishop of Bordeaux sent Sicard to study at the Paris school under the abbé de l'Epée; one year later Sicard opened France's second school for deaf people at Bordeaux. After de l'Epée's death in 1789, Sicard was named to succeed him at the Paris institute.

41. Samuel Heinicke, Beobachtungen über Stumme und über die Menschliche Sprache, in Briefen von Samuel Heinicke, part 1 (Hamburg, 1778).

42. Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, párrafo 2, 83.

43. Ibid., párrafo 9, 86. The charge of plagiarism had been leveled before: José Pellicer had accused Bonet of appropriating Ramírez's work, and Nicolás Antonio had considered Ponce to be the author of the method later published by Bonet (José Pellicer de Tovar, Pirámide baptismal de doña María Teresa Bibiana de Austria, Madrid, October 26, 1638, reproduced in Andrés Morell 1794, vii-viii; Antonio [1672] 1783-1788, 1:354 and 754-755, and 2:228). Romualdo Escalona, chronicler of the Benedictine order, would later echo Feijóo's pinion, charging that the method for which Bonet claimed credit had been invented by Ponce and hypothesizing that "it is very credible that our Ponce, when he taught the constable's brothers, left in the home of this gentleman some record of the art and method with which he did it, and that when Bonet was called to the same house more than fifty years later to teach another, he found or they gave him Ponce's writings" (Escalona, Historia del real monasterio de Sahagún [Madrid, 1782], 206, cited in Eguiluz Angoitia 1986, 315 n. 12). Escalona apparently knew nothing of Ramírez de Carrión.

44. Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, párrafo 9, 86.

45. Ibid., párrafo 9, 86.

46. As Hervás y Panduro would point out later, it is not likely that Bonet, while living in the house of the constable, would dare to falsely attribute to himself the instruction that had been achieved by Ponce. Hervás surmised (correctly) that the deaf person taught by Bonet must have belonged to a later generation (Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:307-308). Pedro de Velasco, Ponce's most brilliant student, had died in 1571, and his brother Francisco had died considerably earlier. Pedro and Francisco, it will be recalled, were siblings of Iñigo de Velasco, the fifth constable of Castile, while Bonet was employed first by Iñigo's son Juan, the sixth constable, and then by Juan's son Bernardino, the seventh constable.

47. The author had been so informed by his countryman José Ignacio de Torres, who wrote to him from Paris, where he practiced medicine (letter from José Ignacio de Torres, cited in Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, segunda adición, párrafo 25, 91). According to Barberá, Torres himself taught deaf people in Valencia and in the French capital (Barberá 1889, 30). If so, however, it is strange that Torres apparently made no mention of it in his correspondence. Furthermore, Feijóo seemed to be unaware of any such instruction, for he believed that Spaniards had long since abandoned deaf education.

48. Feijóo y Montenegro 1759, vol. 4, carta 7, segunda adición, párrafo 30, 94. Even so, the monk was willing to concede that "he still had a lot of ground on which to exercise his inventiveness, if he was to form all the rules of the art based on the foundation that brief description offered him."

49. Ibid., párrafo 33, 95.

50. Andrés Morell (1740-1817) studied at the Seminario de Nobles in Valencia and entered the Society of Jesus in 1754. He taught rhetoric, Latin, and Hebrew at the University of Gandía in Valencia, in southeastern Spain, until the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, then lived in various Italian cities and was eventually named librarian of the royal library at Parma. He was the author of the monumental Dell'origine, progressi e stato attuale d'ogni letteratura (Parma: Dalla Stamperia Reale, 1782-1798). A Spanish version of this work, Origen, progresos y estado actual de toda la literatura, was translated by the author's brother Carlos.

51. The Jesuits were expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1764, from Spain and Naples in 1767, and from Parma and Malta in 1768. Historians have long debated the real reasons behind the expulsion, which Charles III justified to Pope Clement XIII only by citing the sovereign's obligation to watch over the "tranquil preservation of the state, decorum, and internal peace of his vassals" (Carta de Carlos III a Clemente XIII comunicándole la expulsión de los jesuitas, March 31, 1767, in Cortés 1981, 64).

52. Andrés Morell, Lettera sopra l'origine e la vicenta dell'arte d'insegnar a parlare ai sordomuti (Vienna: Ignazio Alberti, 1793). The work was also published in Venice and Naples the same year. Andrés addressed his Lettera to Doña Isabel Parreño, marquise of Llano and Spanish ambassador to the Viennese court.

53. Andrés Morell 1794, 1. Andrés complained that "so many times I have heard even erudite individuals call the abbé de l'Epée the first inventor of the beneficent art of teaching the deaf and mute to speak and write, I have read in so many writers that this glorious invention pertains to the abbé de l'Epée" (43). Nevertheless Andrés conceded the merits of the French teacher: "It is certain that [the art] owes eternal recognition to the merit of de l'Epée," he wrote, in recognition of ''the many advantages he has brought to the art we are dealing with" (45, 52).

54. Andrés explained that his friend Eugenio de Llaguno Amirola, after having read the Lettera, provided him with a copy of Pellicer's dedication to Ramírez de Carrión (Andrés Morell 1794, 18 n.), and Andrés reproduced both the dedication and a portion of Ramírez de Carrión's preface to Maravillas de naturaleza along with his Lettera . But while Pellicer defended Ramírez as the inventor of the art, Andrés wrote—apparently before having read Pellicer's preface—that Ramírez had practiced it after Ponce and Bonet. It is not clear whether Andrés revised his views after reading Pellicer's account. Sucessive page references in the text are to Andrés Morell 1794.

55. Andrés stated that he was actually uncertain as to whether Pereira was Spanish or Portuguese (ibid., 31).

56. Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:19. According to Barberá, some time before publication of his book, Hervás had sent to the editor of the Diario de Madrid a letter concerning the teaching of deaf-mutes. Barberá suggests this occurred in 1790, but I have been unable to locate any such publication in that year, or in the years immediately preceding or following (Barberá 1911, 349). Barberá's source may be C. and R. T. Guyot, who include among Hervás's publications a "Carta al Editor del Diario de Madrid sobre el arte de enscñar a hablar á los sordos y mudos de nacimiento," listing the place and date of publication as Madrid, 1790 (Guyot and Guyot [1842] 1967, 6). If Hervás did indeed compose such a letter in 1790, his writing on the subject would antedate Andrés Morell's Lettera .

57. The work was dedicated to Lorenzo Ponce de León y Baeza, marquis of Castromonte, count of Graciez, Spanish grandee of the first class, and the most important living relative of the monk Pedro Ponce de León.

58. Essentially this same catechism was apparently published as a separate work in 1796. In 1868 a biography of Hervás noted that this book was by then extremely rare, and I have been unable to consult it (Hervás y Panduro, Catecismo de doctrina cristiana, para instrucción de los sordomudos: Dividido en cuatro diálogos [Villalpando, 1796], cited in Caballero 1868, 106).

59. "The man who is commonly called 'mute' ( mudo ), I call 'deaf-mute' ( sordomudo )," he wrote (Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:3). Although in Spain it is generally believed that this author coined the term sordomudo, in 1793, the same year in which Hervás composed his Escuela española de sordomudos, Andrés Morell also used the word sordomuti in his Lettera . In the Spanish version of this work the term is translated as mudos sordos, "deaf mutes," that is, ''mutes [who are] deaf" (Andrés Morell 1794). The word sordomudo continues to be common in Spain today and is used to distinguish those deaf from birth or an early age from sordos, those who lose their hearing later in life without losing their speech. As recently as 1981 Félix-Jesús Pinedo Peydró, who was then president of the Confederación Nacional de Sordos Españoles, railed against the use of the term sordomudo —''Would you accept being called blind because of not seeing well or wearing glasses?" he asked rhetorically—then went on to employ the terms sordomudo and sordo throughout his book as in common usage, that is, with the meanings just described (Pinedo Peydró 1981b, 14). In a more recent book, Pinedo prefers the term sordo to refer to both types of individuals (Pinedo Peydró 1989b).

60. Hervás was the first to establish the principle that languages should be classified according to similarities not in their vocabularies but in their grammars, and he considered the spoken form, rather than the written, the appropriate object of study. His Catalogo delle lingue conosciute e notizia della loro affinitá e diversitá (Cesena, 1785) is known as the cornerstone of comparative philology.

61. Caballero 1868, 23-24. Successive page references in the text are to Caballero 1868.

62. Hervás's dealings with business and commerce were "not due to chance, but rather, to a special inclination or aptitude," this writer insisted, concluding that "when despite his state [as a cleric] and his literary interests this moral feature is so salient, it is doubtlessly a character trait" (ibid., 179-180).

63. Bender states (1970, 97) that Hervás himself had been a missionary in America, but Spanish sources offer nothing to substantiate this claim.

64. Translation of Hervás y Panduro, Il catalogo, 1:73, cited in Caballero 1868, 43.

65. In 1785 Hervás published Il catalogo and Origine formazione ed armonia degl'idiomi (Cesena); two years later he published Vocabulario poligloto con prologomeni sopra piu de 150 lingue and Saggio prattico delle lingue (Cesena, 1787). These books were soon translated and published in Spain. His Idea dell'universo (Cesena, 1778-1787), the last five volumes of which deal with language, may be his most famous work; it includes a compendium of exotic languages and a bibliography of authors of grammars and dictionaries of various languages. The data he amassed on Basque and Iberian and the indigenous languages of the Americas would influence the work of one of the founders of modern linguistics, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in a letter of 1803 opined, "Old Hervás is a disoriented man and without foundation" (the ex-Jesuit was by then in his late sixties, in ill health, and indisputably past his prime). "But he knows a lot," von Humboldt continued, ''and he possesses an incredible treasure of information, and because of this he is always useful" (letter from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Friedrich August Wolf, Rome, April 15, 1803, Gesammelte Werke [Berlin 1846], 5:258, letter 64, cited in Batllori 1966, 203.

66. Hervás y Panduro 1795, 1:67. Successive page references in the text are to Hervás y Panduro 1795.

67. He also mentioned the possibility of a language based on touch (1:128).

68. As in Bébian's Eloge de Charles-Michel de l'Epée .

69. The gloss of the Italian signs, so it appears, would be "Pedro learned more than Pablo."

70. Nor was it widely read abroad—an indication, perhaps, of just how low Spain's reputation had sunk in the field of deaf education. In 1842 C. and R. T. Guyot, who translated parts of Hervás's book into Dutch, remarked that the work was "unknown to many authors" (Guyot and Guyot [1842] 1967, 6 n.).

71. According to Antoine-Joseph Rouyer, who was named head teacher of Madrid's Royal School for Deaf-Mutes at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Albert was a Frenchman. Rouyer recounted that he had journeyed to Barcelona to meet Albert, but upon arriving there he found the school closed because the teacher had returned to France, "his homeland" (ARSEM, letter from Antonio Rouyer to the marquis of Fuerte-Hijar, written in Barcelona oil Max, 30, 1802).

72. Caballero 1868, 54-55.

73. Hervás y Panduro, Preeminencias del prior de Uclés, 4, cited in ibid., 56.

74. In 1798 England had seized the Spanish island of Menorca; in February 1801 Spain declared war against England, and in the ensuing War of the Oranges, 70,000 Spanish soldiers together with 15,000 French troops attacked Portugal. Peace was not restored until March 1802.

1. The cases of Gregorio Santa Fe, discussed in this chapter, and Roberto Prádez, discussed in chapter five, must have escaped general notice, for it was commonly believed that there was no teaching of deaf people in Spain at that time. In a speech at the opening ceremony of the Royal School for Deaf-Mutes in 1805, the duke of Osuna remarked that the art had been abandoned in Spain (inaugural address of January 9, 1805, in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 37-38). In the previous chapter we have seen how, decades earlier, Feijóo had voiced the same lament.

Instances of private teaching of deaf individuals can be documented in the early decades of the nineteenth century as well. The first teaching assistant hired by Madrid's Royal School for Deaf-Mutes, Atanasio Royo Fernández, had taught two deaf residents of Madrid, and their instruction was reported to be well advanced ("Historia del establecimiento," January 15, 1805, 62). Shortly after the school opened in 1805, a new student, Domingo Pérez González, was reported to have already received considerable instruction (ARSEM, leg. 170, doc. 8, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1978, 793 n. 190). In 1813 the Diario de Madrid carried the advertisement of a man claiming he could teach deaf pupils to read, write, count, and speak, "as he has already done with some" ( Diario de Madrid, June 14, 1813, #165, 662). And the following year in a speech at the Royal School Agustin de Silva, the duke of Hijar, referred to a "tender mother of two deaf-mutes'' who had taught her own children (Silva 1814, 19).

2. Godoy [1836] 1956, 211-212. Alea twice corroborated Godoy's account, stating in 1804 that the "Prince of Peace" had been the first in his nation to appear before the throne "on behalf of these wretched creatures" (Alea 1804-1805, 98 n. 1); again in 1807 he paid him a similar tribute (dedication by Alea, in Sicard 1807).

Manuel Godoy Alvarez de Faria Ríos Sánchez Zarzosa (1767-1851), Spanish statesman, Prince of Peace and of Basano, duke of Alcudia and of Sweden, captain general of the Spanish army and admiral of Spain and of the Indies, was for many years the most influential man in Spain. Born to noble parents of modest means, Godoy joined the Royal Guard in 1784 and promptly became the favorite of Queen María Luisa. By 1792 he had become the lieutenant general of the Royal Guard, and shortly thereafter Charles IV made him secretary of state. Godoy sponsored the instruction of two deaf children, Gonzalo and Rafaela Barat, whose father was deceased (Alea's dedication in Sicard 1807). "This new teaching [of deaf people] was a special object of my affection and my talents," he intoned in his "Memorias" (Godoy [1836] 1956, 212).

3. Juan Fernández Navarrete de Santa Bárbara (no relation to Juan Fernández Navarrete, El Mudo, the famous deaf painter of chapter one) was born in Murcia in 1758 and entered the order of the Fathers of Pia in 1774. In 1804 he left the order—according to Nebreda y López, as a consequence of the French invasion (Nebreda y López 1870b, 15).

In a communication dated October 24, 1793, Navarrete's superior, the Provincial Father of the Piarist schools of Castile, was informed of the king's desire that the priest should dedicate himself to the teaching of deaf people, and he was instructed not to impede him from so doing or to distract him with other occupations. A communication of April 26, 1794, conveyed the royal approval of the Provincial Father's request to establish a deaf school in Madrid under the direction of Father Navarrete. In his memoirs Godoy wrote that it had been his idea to open a school for deaf pupils, stating that he had made the suggestion to Charles IV one night in July or August 1794 and that the king decreed the establishment of the school the very next day (Godoy [1836] 1956, 211-212). But the date of the letter to the Provincial Father of the Piarist schools of Castile explaining the king's wish that Navarrete undertake this instruction is October 24, 1793, not 1794, and both communiques to the Provincial Father are signed by the duke of Alcudia—that is, Godoy himself. Thus, at the very least, it would seem that the royal favorite's recollection of the dates is incorrect. ( The documents in question, from the Archivo de las Escuelas Pías de Castilla, Madrid, were provided to me by Father Vicente Hidalgo.)

4. Founded in 1729, San Fernando was the first Piarist school established in Madrid. The order had long been known for its excellence in teaching, and during the period under discussion it enjoyed the favor of the crown, for Ferdinand VII's sisters were taught by a Piarist priest, as was the king himself for some months (Ruiz Berrio 1970, 205).

According to some authors (e.g., Barberá 1911, 350; Negrín Fajardo 1982, 8 n. 6), Navarrete's school came under the protection of Madrid's Economic Society of Friends of the Country in 1800, at which time it was housed in a building of the town hall called the Panadería, located on the Plaza Mayor. In May 1802, however, the actas of the Friends of the Country continue to refer to Fernández Navarrete as being at the Lavapiés school (ARSEM, Actas, May 1, 1802).

5. That Navarrete had trained for some years in Rome is documented in a letter of October 24, 1793, to the Provincial Father of the Piarist schools of Castile, signed by the duque de Alcudia (AEPC), and in a letter written to the Diario de Madrid by a contemporary, José Miguel Alea (Alea 1795, 262).That Navarrete was a disciple of Silvestri is stated in the Acta de la comisión del colegio de sordomudos of May 24, 1803, cited in the Actas de la Real Sociedad Económica Matritense de Amigos del País of May 28, 1803 (ARSEM). Some authors would have it that Navarrete had studied in Genova with the Plarist father Ottavio Assarotti as well (Granell y Forcadell 1936b, 3; Perelló and Tortosa 1972, 8).

6. It is sometimes claimed that Alea was a disciple of de l'Epée (De Gérando 1827, 2:213; Peet 1851a, 157; Bender 1970, 161; Garcia Pico de Ponce 1987, 156), and some authors go so far as to state that he studied at the Paris school (Ferreri 1913, 3:190, Bernaldo de Quiros and Gueler 1966, 332). I have found no documentation in Spain suggesting that Alea ever studied with de l'Epée, however, and if he had, surely he would have said so himself. Moreover, when in 1795 Alea sought out a certain Spaniard who had studied under the French abbé, he stated that he hoped his countryman would inform him about de l'Epée's methods, suggesting that Alea had never visited the Paris school (see the text below). As for the claim that Alea was a disciple of de l'Epée, if anything he seemed more an admirer of Sicard, although he was not an uncritical follower of either man. He wrote that while de l'Epée had begun the public instruction of deaf people, his approach was too limited, and he had revealed himself to be "more a grammarian than a philosopher." Sicard, he felt, had advanced the technique considerably, however (Alea, foreword to Sicard 1807, iii).

It is also common to read that Alea opened a school for deaf students in Madrid (Peet 1851, 157a; Julián Zarco Cuevas, Documentos para la Historia del Monasterio de San Lorenzo el Real de El Escorial [Madrid, Imprenta Helenica, n.d.], 211-213, cited in Bender 1970 161; García Pico de Ponce 1987, 156). This is not strictly so either, although Alea did collaborate in the establishment of the Royal School for Deaf-Mutes (see the text below). And on abates, see discussion in chapter 5.

7. AEPC, letter of April 26, 1794, to the Provincial Father of the Piarist schools of Castile, signed by the duke of Alcudia.

8. Of the priest's other student, Alea remarked only that he was from outside Madrid. At the time Alea composed his letter, Navarrete was teaching a young girl, and two more deaf children were due to arrive from Galicia. Alea estimated that there were some thirty to forty deaf people then residing in the Spanish court, and perhaps two thousand in the entire kingdom (Alea 1795, 262).

9. Ibid., 262.

10. Ibid., 359.

11. An English visitor attested that "Madrid, though built in a stately style, has been properly called the dullest capital in Europe" (Quin 1824, 118).

12. Fischer 1802, 188. Another foreign traveler remarked upon several other pastimes as well: "At Madrid there is a great scarcity of amusements, which are therefore supplied by devotion, and its sister passion love" (Link 1801, 99).

13. Alea 1795, 353-354. Querol, the most famous comic actor of the era, performed regularly at the Teatro de la Cruz, one of Madrid's two theaters. According to one of Alea's contemporaries, "The Teatro de la Cruz maintained its ancient ugliness ... [but] the celebrated comic Querol sparkled there" (Alcalá Galiano [1878] 1951, 48, 68).

14. Ibid., 360.

15. Ibid., 354.

16. Menéndez y Pelayo [1883-1891] 1909, 6:120. Manuel José Quintana (1772-1857) elected as his main themes liberty and progress. During Spain's war of independence he sided with the liberals, and at the close of that conflict he was banished and imprisoned under Ferdinand VII, although Queen Isabel II would later crown him poet laureate. Quintana played an important role as a reformer of Spain's educational system at the cortes, or parliament, at Cadiz during the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823), and under the government that followed the reign of Ferdinand VII (see Ruiz Berrio 1970, 3, 15, 26, 53).

17. Alcalá Galiano [1878] 1951, 77. Antonio Alcalá Galiano (1789-1865), a celebrated writer and political figure renowned for his fiery oratory, served as representative to the parliament at Cadiz from 1822 to 1823; with the subsequent restoration of absolutist government, he was sentenced to death and emigrated to England. He returned to his homeland in 1835 and resumed his political career, but was soon forced to emigrate again, this time to France. Back in Spain in 1837, he represented the district of Cadiz in parliament, and in his old age wrote his celebrated memoirs, Recuerdos de un anciano . When he first attended Quintana's tertulia in 1806, he was sixteen years old.

18. José María Blanco White (1775-1841) was raised a Roman Catholic and was ordained in 1800, but he became skeptical after reading the works of Feijóo and Fénelon. Eventually he became a political liberal and moved to England, where he founded El español (1810-1813) to crusade against Spanish colonialism. For this author's comments on the two rival tertulias, see Blanco White 1822, 377-380.

Poet and dramatist Nicasio Alvarez Cienfuegos (1764-1809) was editor of the Gaceta and El mercurio and held an official position in the State Department (Secretaría de Estado). At the onset of the war of independence he declared his opposition to the French invader. The government of occupation banished him to France, where he died in 1809.

Juan Nicasio Gallego (1777-1853), poet of the Salamanca school, was once imprisoned for his liberal ideas; he later became canon of the cathedral of Seville, and in 1839 he was named secretary to the Real Academia Española.

The Spanish politician and journalist José Marchena Ruiz y Cueto (1768-1821), known as the abate Marchena, was given a religious education and took minor orders at his parents' insistence; he launched his writing career with a letter against ecclesiastical celibacy directed to one of his professors. He was eventually condemned to jail by the Inquisition for ideas acquired from the assiduous reading of Voltaire, but he managed to flee first to Gibraltar, then to France. There he collaborated in the publication of the periodical L'Ami du Peuple . In 1808 he entered Spain with the French general Murat, only to be imprisoned by the Inquisition, then freed by Murat's troops. During the reign of José Bonaparte he wrote for the official Gaceta de Madrid and served as head archivist at the Ministry of the Interior. At the close of the war of independence Marchena emigrated to France, then returned to Spain in 1820, dying in abject poverty the following year. He was the author of numerous literary and critical works. Menéndez y Pelayo characterized him as representative of the "political and antireligious tendencies of his age in the highest degree of exaltation," portraying him as an "indecent sage and [a] monster filled with talent, a propagandist of impiety with missionary and apostolic zeal, corrupter of a great portion of Spanish youth for the better half of a century" (Menéndez y Pelayo [1881] 1956, 2:727, 757).

Eugenio de Tapia (1767-1860), liberal journalist and historian, served as joint editor of the Cadiz Gaceta during the war of independence. At the close of the Liberal Triennium in 1823,Tapia went into exile in France, only to return to honors in his homeland eight years later. He was director of the Biblioteca Nacional from 1843 to 1847.

Antonio de Capmany Suris y de Montpalau (1742-1813) sided with the liberals during the French invasion and served as deputy to the cortes at Cadiz. Eventually he was named secretary of the Royal Academy of History.

Juan Bautista Arriaza y Superviela (1790-1837) was the author of such patriotic works as Poesías patrióticas, Los defensores de la patria, and Himno de la victoria . During the war of independence he would support the absolute monarch Ferdinand VII.

The writer and poet José Somoza y Muñoz (1781-1852) cast his lot with the liberals during the war of independence. He was persecuted and imprisoned first by the French, then by Ferdinand VII. In 1834 and again in 1836 he served as procurador at the Spanish cortes and representative from Avila.

Manuel María de Arjona y de Cubas (1771-1820) was a minor poet and canon of the cathedral at Córdoba.

19. Alcalá Galiano [1878] 1951, 77, 60. His Recuerdos de un anciano provides a firsthand account of the two tertulias and some of the participants (59-62, 72-73, 77, 88).

20. Ibid., 73. Antonio de Capmany, quoted in Menéndez y Pelayo [1881] 1956, 2:640.

21. Leandro Fernández Moratín (1760-1828) was known for his masterful use of language, exquisite taste, and brilliant wit and satire. Having sided with France during the war of independence, he fled to that country in 1817, returned to Barcelona during the Liberal Triennium, then went into exile once again, dying in his adopted homeland in 1828.

22. The writer Pedro Estala joined the Piarist fathers but subsequently left the order. He taught literary history at the Reales Estudios de San Isidro in Madrid and during the war of independence was a supporter of José Bonaparte, following the French army to Valencia, where together with Moratín he published a political and literary journal. At the close of the war Estala emigrated to France.

Juan Antonio Melón was editor of the Semanario de agricultura y artes, dirigido a los párrocos (Madrid: Villalpando, 1797), a weekly publication whose purpose was to "extend to the inhabitants of the countryside the knowledge that can improve their lot."

Menéndez y Pelayo describes Juan Tineo as a nephew of Jovellanos who had studied in Bologna, cofounder along with Moratín of the burlesque Academia de Acalófilos (adorers of the ugly), and an avid reader of Latin and Italian. Tineo's publications were, according to this author, limited to a reply to Quintana's observations on Moratín's play La Mojigata and, posthumously, two critical essays, one on Moratín, the other on the poet Juan Valdés Meléndez (1754-1817) (Menéndez y Pelayo [1883-1891] 1904, 6:142).

José Mamerto Gómez y Hermosilla (1771-1837), writer, critic, and Hellenist, held the chairs of Greek and rhetoric at the Estudios de San Isidro in Madrid. During the war of independence he sided with the French and was obliged to emigrate in 1814. In 1820 he returned to Spain, where he continued to write and teach, and was eventually named secretary to the General Inspector of Public Instruction.

23. As Moratín's contemporary Blanco White (see note 18 above) explained, "I do not know that [Moratín] has published anything besides his plays, or that he has, as yet, given a collection of them to the public. I conceive that some fears of the Inquisitorial censures are the cause of this delay. There has, indeed, been a time when his play, La Mojigata, or Female Devotee, was scarcely allowed to be acted, it being believed that, but for the patronage of the Prince of Peace, it would long before have been placed in the list of forbidden works" (Blanco White 1822, 380).

24. Ibid., 379.

25. This, according to Alcalá Galiano [1878] 1951, 59. Such may have been the case of Alea. Although a frequenter of Quintana's tertulia, Alea nevertheless took Gregorio Santa Fe to the quarters of Fernández Navarrete, who was a friend of Moratín's (see the text below). Unlike other participants at Quintana's tertulia, Alea also dedicated at least three of his works to Godoy (see below). Successive page references in the text are to Alea 1795.

26. Alea's comments concerning the manual alphabet "for the deaf" are of interest, for here he uses the term sordos rather than sordos y mudos (deaf-mutes), revealing that the hand alphabet was used by persons deafened after having learned to speak.

27. According to Father Francisco de Paula Solá (letter of September 9, 1987), there is no record of any Diego Vidal among the Jesuits of Aragon in the years before the expulsion. Miquel Batllori of the Istituto Storico della Compagnia di Gesù (letter of November 24, 1987) also affirms that the name Diego Vidal does not appear in the catalog of Jesuits in Aragon prior to the expulsion, nor on the list compiled by order of the royal official Juan Antonio de Archibauld y Solano (both documents pertain to the Istituto Storico).

According to the Piarist father Dionisio Cueva (letter of January 12, 1987), there was indeed a Jesuit who arrived from Italy to live among the Piarist priests at the convent of Santo Tomás, but he was not Diego Vidal. Furthermore, there is no mention of Diego Vidal in the Archivo de las Escuelas Pías of Saragossa, or in the Archivo de la Curia Provincial (that is, the Archivo Provincial de las Escuelas Pías de Aragón), or in the Archivo Generalicio in Rome. It appears, then, that Diego Vidal was not a Piarist, despite what some would claim (see the following note). Moreover, Father Claudio Vilá attests that the chronicles of the Piarist school in Saragossa, which opened in 1731, record nothing about the teaching of deaf pupils (letter of May 11, 1986).

28. To further complicate matters, Granell claims that a Piarist priest by the name of Diego Vidal, who was born in Tauste in 1675 and died in Saragossa in 1740, founded a school for deaf children in the convent of Santo Tomás of Saragossa (Granell y Forcadell 1935). This author, who is not always reliable, cites no sources; moreover, the dates he gives for Vidal's life do not coincide with the years of Gregorio's instruction, and as already observed, the Piarist fathers of Saragossa have no record of Diego Vidal, or of any teaching of deaf children at the school of Santo Tomás.

29. The Libros de Aragón numbers 444, 445, 446, 451, 452, 460, 462, 467, AHN, Inquisición, list the people appointed to the Inquisition from 1755 to 1797, but make no mention of Pedro Santa Fe. And letters from the Inquisitorial Tribunal of Saragossa to the Council of Aragon during the years when Vidal supposedly taught Gregorio include nothing signed by Pedro Santa Fe (AHN, Inquisición, leg. 2,356). Had he been secretary to the Inquisition, his signature would surely have appeared on these documents.

30. This fact was first brought to my attention by Professor José Martínez Millán, who generously assisted me with this area of my research.

31. The Papal Inquisition had functioned in the kingdom of Aragon since the thirteenth century, but the Spanish Inquisition was now to be unified under one central control, that of the Council of the Supreme and General Inquisition, headed by Tomás de Torquemada. In Aragon there was great opposition to introduction of the Castilian model.

32. By 1484 Arbués was already on record as rejoicing at the goods expropiated from Saragossa's New Christians (P. Sánchez Moya, Carta autógrafa de San Pedro Arbués a los inquisidores de Teruel, in Teruel, 17-18 [1957], 347, cited in Mur i Raurell 1988, 134).

33. Jerónimo de Santa Fe, celebrated Jewish theologian and physician to Benedict XIII, became a Catholic in 1412, and that same year he determined to convert his former coreligionists. Although at his urging more than three thousand Jews accepted the Catholic faith, their conversion probably owed more to political pressure than to the zealous New Christian's efforts to sway their beliefs.

Other prominent conversos involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Pedro Arbués included Sancho Paternoy, the mestre racional at court, Gabriel Sánchez, high treasurer of the kingdom, and Luis Santángel, who had been knighted by the last king for his services in battle. The d'Almacan, Montesa, Santa Cruz, Esperandeu, Abadía, Ram, and Durango families, all New Christians, were also implicated in the plot.

34. On September 17, 1485. Arbués was revered as a saint, miracles were attributed to his relics, and he was eventually canonized by the Holy See.

35. So many were involved in the conspiracy that people continued to be punished for the next seven years. All together it has been estimated that some two hundred persons were punished for complicity, though Roth believes this figure may be exaggerated (Roth 1974, 50).

36. Even so, his cadaver was not to escape the wrath of the Inquisition. The charges were read in the presence of the corpse. After the sentence was pronounced, the body was burned and the remains were placed in a box and thrown in the Ebro River (Memoria de diversos autos de Inquisicion celebrados en aragoça desde el año 1484 hasta el de 1502 en que se refieren las personas castigadas en ellos, Auto 16, 1486, cited in Lea 1922, 1:601).

37. In the words of Blanco White, "There exists [a] distinction of blood, which, I think, is peculiar to Spain, and to which the mass of the people are so blindly attached, that the meanest peasant looks upon the want of it as a source of misery and degradation, which he is doomed to transmit to his latest posterity. The least mixture of African, Indian, Moorish, or Jewish blood, taints a whole family to the most distant generation" (Blanco White 1822, 29-30). Statutes requiring purity of the bloodline for entry into certain professions, positions within the Church, universities, and even trade guilds and unions were still in effect at this time, and those rumored to be of converso descent continued to be distrusted and shunned. Not until 1865 did the Spanish parliament abolish the last of the limpieza statutes.

38. The anonymous author was anxious that the 1492 expulsion of the Jews should not erase from memory the identities of the remaining families of converso origin. The writer left Saragossa in January 1507 because of an epidemic of the plague and did not return until July of that same year. During his absence he compiled his manuscript, which promptly became a major source of scandal as it was handed along, copied and recopied, augmented, and distorted. Finally, in 1623, the government, unwilling to tolerate this vicious slander of some of the kingdom's most prominent aristocrats, ordered all copies burned—but needless to say, some survived. There were other "green books" as well, such as the infamous Tizón de España (brand of Spain), which showed that many Spanish grandees had Jewish or Moorish blood.

39. Cagigas [1507] 1929, 14.

40. "Ravi Vsulurguin had a son and two daughters by his wife who was also Jewish[.] The son was micer Francisco de Santaffe who was assessor of the government, [and] who while imprisoned by the Inquisition took his own life and they burned his body for being a judaizing heretic" (Cagigas [1507] 1929, 45-46). Santa Fe (holy faith) was a typical converso last name, as were Santa María (holy Mary), Santa Catalina (Saint Catherine), Santa Cruz (holy cross) and Santángel (holy angel).

41. Blanco White remembered especially the converso family's pretty young daughter, whom he encountered regularly. Yet he shrank from establishing even the most superficial personal contact with her, "scarcely venturing to cast a side glance on [her]," he explained, "for fear, as I said to myself, of shaming her." Remarking on Spain's contempt for New Christians, he concluded, "I verily believe, that were St. Peter a Spaniard, he would either deny admittance into heaven to people of tainted blood, or send them to a retired corner, where they might not offend the eyes of the Old Christians" (Blanco White 1822, 30-31).

42. This was suggested to me by Professor José Martínez Millán.

43. The phenomenon may have been repeated in the nineteenth century as well, when another Spaniard who may have been of Jewish descent, Juan Manuel Ballesteros y Santa María, chose the same vocation—see the conclusion.

44. Alea 1795, 360.

45. AEPC, letter of June 1802 to the Provincial Father of the Piarist Schools. Navarrete was to teach the boy for one year, with the possibility of extending his stay if the instruction achieved in that time was not sufficient (documentation provided to me by Father Vicente Hidalgo).

46. In a letter of May 30, 1802, to the marquis of Fuerte-Híjar, director of Madrid's Economic Society, Rouyer wrote from Barcelona that Albert's school had been closed for some four months because the teacher had gone back to France (ARSEM, leg. 175, doc. 3).

47. The letter Rouyer wrote to the Friends of the Country is reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 17, and 1936c, 3. According to Granell, Rouyer had taught in Navarrete's school before approaching the Economic Society (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 14), but I have seen no evidence of this in the society's archives. Furthermore, the claim seems dubious because the commission to establish the school would later complain that Rouyer had worked only as a dentist and as a French teacher (ARSEM, Report of the commission for the school, leg. 157, doc. 7, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1982, 21 n. 53).

48. Antoine-Joseph Rouyer 1818, 3.

49. Juan Bautista Rouyer was contracted from Spain to work as the king's dentist in 1753; he was in Paris at the time. He held the post until 1803, the year of his death (AP, Administración, caja 922, expediente 41).

50. In this, Rouyer sought to build upon the work of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), whose interests included the development of an ideal language in which each simple idea would be represented by a single symbol. Rouyer had authored a Prospectus d'un alphabet commun à toutes les langues (Paris, n.d.), published by the Paris Institute for Deaf-Mutes—half the profits were earmarked for the school—and in 1792 he published an Essai raisonné de monographie universelle, ou recherche analytique d'un chiffre parfait proper à développer, dans toutes les langues, les vrais principes de l'art d'écrire comme l'on parle (Paris: Clousier). In 1796 the Diario de Madrid published a letter from a " licenciado A. J. Rouyer, teacher of mutes and of the French language" in which the author revealed his interest in the invention of a universal writing system to represent ideas directly, independent of their pronunciation. Because the symbols would stand for ideas, rather than sounds, the writer of the letter explained, it would be mutually intelligible to all who used it, regardless of their mother tongue. He compared such a writing system to the language of signs, which he took to be universal ( Diario de Madrid, January 19, 1796, 73-74). In 1818 Rouyer published Le paladin de la Meuse, observations impartiales d'un philosophe chrétien, ou accord des lumières de la raison et des vérités de la foi (Paris: Choppin fils); on the title page he referred to himself as "maître-ès-arts de l'ancienne Université de Paris."

51. ARSEM, leg. 153/16, Informe, April 1804.

52. Discurso para la abertura de las Juntas Generales que celebró la Sociedad Bascongada en la Villa de Vergara (1785), cited in Carr 1982, 41. Spain's first organization of the Friends of the Country had been founded in the Basque Country in the mid-1760s, the result of a tertulia of Basque gentry. The Madrid society was established in 1775.

53. For discussion of the view of education during the years 1808-1833, see Ruiz Berrio 1970, 10 ff. On the society's educational goals see Negrín Fajardo 1981.

54. The Friends of the Country had already revealed their interest in deaf education, for shortly before Rouyer approached the society, a member of that body had asked Sicard to allow two Benedictines from the Congregation of Aranjuez to study with him, so that they might return to Spain and teach with his method. Sicard turned down the proposal, supposedly because he knew of his student Rouyer's plans (Manuel Pinagua 1857, 39; Granell y Forcadell 1932, 15, Negrín Fajardo 1982, 9-10).

55. The duke of Aliaga, who in 1808 would become director of the society, commented that unschooled deaf people were "trunks without souls," they were "judged as incapable, reputed to be at the same level as the irrational, and cared only about their animal needs, without stopping to think deeply, or wanting to understand how to explain themselves'' (duke of Aliaga, Discurso pronunciado ... para abrir el examen general de los alumnos del R. Colegio de Sordomudos, 1806, ARSEM, leg. 175, doc. 17, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1978, 713 n. 34).

56. Introductory remarks to a letter by Alea in the Diario de Madrid, July 13, 1795, 789.

57. Godoy himself expressed the emerging view of deaf people as a social group when he remarked, concerning their instruction, "Government should attend to all the unprotected classes" (Godoy [1836] 1956, 211).

58. The question of whether deaf communities existed in Spain before the foundation of schools is an important one that deserves further study. The deaf author Pierre Desloges affirmed that Paris had a deaf community with a common manual language before the abbé de l'Epée opened his school there (Pierre Desloges [1779] in Lane 1984, 36); however, Van Cleve and Crouch suggest that in this respect, "Paris seems to be unique. There is no convincing evidence that deaf communities existed elsewhere until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (Van Cleve and Crouch 1989, 1). With respect to Spain, I have found no conclusive evidence about deaf communities before the establishment of their public education, but Bonet's remark, cited in chapter two, about the sign deaf people used for "many," is compatible with the hypothesis that at least as early as the first decades of the seventeenth century, a deaf community with a sign language may have existed in Spain (Bonet [1620] 1930, 167). At any rate, whether Spain had a deaf community (or communities) before the foundation of the Royal School or not, this institution was destined to become the nucleus of the Spanish deaf community.

59. Meckenzie 1831, 319. The Puerta del Sol (gate of the sun) is a highly frequented spot in the center of Madrid where a number of busy streets originate—the Red de San Luis, the Calle Mayor, the Calle de San Jerónimo, etc.

60. ARSEM, leg. 179, doc. 13, Report of the commission, May 1803. For the same reason, the commission for the foundation of the school would recommend against appointment of Navarrete as spiritual director in 1803.

61. ARSEM, leg. 175, doc. 3, letter from Rouyer to the director of the Friends of the Country, dateline Paris, July 3, 1802.

62. The royal order allocating 100,000 reales vellón per year is reproduced in the Actas (ARSEM, March 27, 1802) and also in Granell y Forcadell (1932, 18-19).

63. ARSEM, Actas, Report of the commission, September 29, 1803.

64. Sicard, according to Rouyer, lamented his disciple's leaving at that time—winter of 1803—and offered to write to the society requesting that he be allowed to remain until spring, but Rouyer opted to return at once (ARSEM, leg. 178, doc. 6, letter of January 23, 1803, from Rouyer to the marquis of Fuerte-Híjar).

65. ARSEM, leg. 178, doc. 6, letter from Rouyer of March 11, 1804. The dispute was further complicated because Charles IV had stipulated that the Friends of the Country should pay for Rouyer's trip to Paris and for his stay there, but the society later declared itself free of this obligation. Rouyer then protested this decision before the king, who sided with the Frenchman. For details Of the dispute, see ARSEM, Actas of September 20, 1803, and leg. 178, doc. 6. The entire affair is recounted in splendid detail in Negrín Fajardo 1982, 18-23.

66. ARSEM, letter from Juan de Dios Loftus y Bazán to the Friends of the Country, leg. 160, doc. 12, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1982, 24 n. 63.

67. Ibid., 25 n. 67.

68. Letter from Loftus to the Friends of the Country, July 11, 1804 (ARSEM, leg. 160, doc. 12, e, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1982, 25 n. 67).

69. ARSEM, Actas, October 27, 1804.

70. ARSEM, leg. 175, doc. 3, letter from Rouyer to the marquis of Fuerte-Híjar, May 30, 1802.

71. ARSEM, leg. 176, doc. 9, Relación de lo hecho por la comisión de sordo-mudos después de la última junta de premios, n.d.

72. Atanasio Royo Fernández had originally been named to the position of assistant, which he soon resigned (ARSEM, leg. 195, doc. 2, report of Josef de Bernedo of June 7, 1805), paving the way for Machado's appointment.

73. Granell refers to ''the many clouds that hung over [Machado] for having embezzled 2,500 reales vellón from the regiment of grenadiers, in which he was a second lieutenant" (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 39). Negrín Fajardo suggests that Granell imputed to Machado the misdeed that had actually been committed by Loftus, although he offers no documention to support this claim (Negrín Fajardo 1978, 807 n. 214).

74. The dank rooms at that address soon gave the children chilblains; two years after its inauguration, the school was moved to a building known as the Villena, on the Plazuela de las Descalzas (ARSEM, leg. 202, doc. 6, report of January 23, 1807).

75. By 1805 Salvador Vieta, a chaplain at the cathedral, was teaching deaf people in Barcelona at his own expense. In July of that year he displayed six students before a meeting of the Royal Academy of Medicine held in Barcelona's Royal Palace of the Inquisition, winning the academy's approbation. Details of the session were recorded in the Gaceta de Madrid, August 9, 1805, no. 64, 683, and in the society's Actas of March 8, 1806, and July 18, 1806. The following year Vieta would contact the society in Madrid, seeking protection for his school. He also sought the society's backing of his request for royal support; he hoped that the crown would relieve him of the obligation of being physically present in his parish while still allowing him to receive the benefice, so that he might dedicate himself more fully to his deaf pupils (ARSEM, leg. 199, doc. 6; leg. 202, doc. 14; leg. 203, doc. 6).

76. Reglamento of 1804, ch. 12, art. 1, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 33-34 (The entire document is reproduced in ibid., 27-35). The five students present at the opening ceremonies were Juan de Mata Blanco, Manuel Muñoz López, José Hernández Rueda, Juan Miguel Alvarez y Grande, and José María de la Madrid; a sixth boy, Basilio Calvete Tovar, was at home sick (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 38). By 1806 there would be twelve students at the school (ARSEM, leg. 178, doc. 20, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1978, 788-789).

77. "Historia del establecimiento," Jan. 15, 1805, 63-64.

78. Reglamento of 1804, ch. 2 art. 18, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 29.

79. Obligations of the board are spelled out in ch. 2 of the Reglamento of 1804; those of the head teacher are stated in ch. 5 (reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 28-29, 30).

80. Reglamento of 1804, ch. 8, ch. 9 art. 1, ch. 10 art. 3, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 31-34. By 1806 the number of students had risen to twelve: seven boarders and five day students. Only two, one boarder and one day student, were paying (ARSEM, leg. 178, doc. 20, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1978, 788-789). Two of the day students were hearing persons who suffered from a defect of pronunciation (ARSEM, leg. 178, doc. 20, cited in Negrín Fajardo 1978, 789 n. 183).

81. Reglamento of 1804, ch. 10 art. 4, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 33. For details on the various classes of students, see chs. 8-11, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 31-33.

82. Royal order of November 3, 1803, in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 35.

83. At this time the majority of Spaniards received only an elementary education, consisting of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the catechism, and basic notions of Spanish history and geography (Ruiz Berrio 1970, 21).

84. Reglamento of 1804, ch. 12 n., reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 34. In primary schools for hearing children, religious education during this era consisted of little more than rote memorization of catechisms—brief summaries of the principles of the Catholic religion in question-and-answer format (Ruiz Berrio 1970, 21).

85. Reglamento of 1804, ch. 5 art. 1, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 30.

86. ARSEM, leg. 175, doc. 2, May 15, 1802.

87. Alca applied for admission to the society in June 1803 (ARSEM, leg. 187, doc. 1, expediente no. 7).

88. AWSEM, leg. 195, doc. 2, reports that Alea was put in charge of theoretical aspects of instruction. The manuals in question were, presumably, de l'Epée's Institution des sourds-muets par la voie des signes méthodiques (Paris: Nyon, 1776), La véritable manière d'instruire les sourds et muets, conformée par une longue expérience (Paris: Nyon, 1784), by the same author, and Sicard's Cours d'instruction d'un sourd-muet de naissance (Paris: Le Clère, 1800).

89. ARSEM, leg. 195, doc. 2, report on the state of the school, June 7, 1805. Roch-Ambroise Sicard, Manuel de l'enfance (Paris: Le Clère, 1797), and Eléments de grammaire générale (Paris: Bourlotton, 1799).

90. Harlan Lane Suggests (1984, 112) that many of the schools spawned by the French institute probably adopted the principle of instructing deaf pupils by means of methodical sign, and not the French methodical signs themselves, and this may have been the case at the Madrid school as well.

91. ARSEM, leg. 203, doc. 3, document presented by Juan Machado, December 29, 1807. A few years later Loftus continued to employ Sicard's method, adapted to the syntax of the Spanish language (ARSEM, leg. 206, doc. 7). Had Rouyer taught at the school, in all probability he would have employed the same signs used by Sicard.

92. ARSEM, leg. 195, doc. 6, letter of June 8, 1805, from Loftus to the society's director.

93. As was the case when Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, an American who had studied at the Paris school, and Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher there, together established the first school for deaf people in the United States at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. Although the Hartford school adopted French methodical signs, American students' indigenous signs soon entered the lexicon and in 1978—that is, 161 years after initial contact—modern American Sign Language and modern French Sign Language were found to have only about 61 percent cognates in the basic vocabulary (Woodward 1978, 338).

Alvaro Marchesi states that "by different paths" French Sign Language was transported to various European countries, among them Spain, and that it influenced the language of the Spanish deaf communities (Marchesi 1987, 94). Although undocumented and unexplained, this claim is plausible. There exist dictionaries of French signs dating from the early nineteenth century, and the first dictionary of Spanish signs that I am aware of was published in 1851, so it would be possible to compare lexical items from the two languages to determine the percentage of signs of French origin used in Spain in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the percentage of signs of French origin in use today. Lane cites the following early descriptions and dictionaries of French Sign Language (Lane 1984, 432 n. 9): J. Brouland, Explication d'un dictionnaire des signes du langage mimique (Paris: Imprimcrie de l'Institution des Sourds-Muets, 1855), P. Pélissier, L'enseignement primaire des sourds-muets à la portée de tout le monde, avec une iconographie des signes (Paris: Dupont, 1856), C. M. de l'Epée, Dictionnaire des sourds-muets, publié d'après le manuscrit original et précédé d'une préface par le Dr. J. A. A. Rattel (Paris: Baillière, 1896), R. A. C. Sicard, Théorie des signes pour l'instruction des sourdsmuets ... suivie d'une notice sur l'enfance de Massieu (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Institution des Sourds-Muets, 1808), A. Blanchet, La Surdi-Mutité (Paris: Labé, 1850), L. M. Lambert, Le langage de la physionomie et du geste (Paris: J. Lecoffre, 1865), L. M. Lambert, "Méthode d'instruction des sourds-muets adultes," Le conseiller des sourds-muets (1870), 6, 69-83, 167-174. The earliest Spanish works I know of are Francisco Fernàndez Villabrille, Diccionario usual de mímica y dactilología (Madrid: Colegio de Sordomudos y Ciegos, 1851), and Miguel Fernández Villabrille, Biblioteca de la enseñanza especial de sordomudos y de ciegos: Diccionario de mímica y dactilología (Madrid: Gregorio Hernando, 1876).

94. Nebreda y López 1870b, 17, and Pichardo y Casado 1875, 6; Cabello y Madurga 1875b, 10-11.

95. Andrés Morell, writing in 1793, referred to Feijóo's work as "very common, printed and reprinted many times, and translated and abridged in various foreign languages." According to this author, Feijóo's work had been translated into French and Italian, extracts were available in England, and the original Spanish version "is to be found everywhere" (Andrés Morell 1794, 8).

96. In his letter Alea referred to an arte written by Bonet that was by then rare, but he seems not to have personally consulted the book, for he did not mention the title and erroneously stated the date of publication as 1609, rather than 1620 (Alea 1795, 287). The duke of Aliaga also confirmed that Bonet's book was rare in his day (ARSEM, Leg. 199, doc. 24, Discurso pronunicado por ... el duque de Aliaga, September 10, 1806). In 1803 Alea reported that he had tried to teach articulation using Bonet's book, however (Alea 1803a, 102.).

97. "Everyone in Spain knew the excellent work of the abate Don Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, entitled Escuela española de sordomudos, o arte para enseñarles a escribir y hablar el idioma español, " Godoy wrote in his memoirs (Godoy [1836] 1956, 212).

98. The opinion is expressed, for example, in the inaugural address pronounced by the duke of Osuna on January 9, 1805, at the opening of the Madrid school (cited in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 37), and in a speech given at the students' first public examination the following year by the duke of Aliaga, who succeeded Godoy as the society's director (ARSEM, leg. 199, doc. 24).

99. Manuel José Quintana, quoted in Menéndez y Pelayo [1881] 1956, 2:617.

100. The French play by Jean Nicolas Bouilly was translated into Spanish by Juan de Estrada. It was announced in the Diario de Madrid of July 23, 1800, and again on June 10, 1802, and was performed at the Príncipe theater. For discussion of the content of this work, see Lane 1984, 42-66.

101. Or among other Spaniards of the day either, as far as I have been able to ascertain.

102. According to Ruiz Berrio, between 1808 and 1833, the majority learned to read and write and also mastered some principles of arithmetic, the basics of Spanish history and geography, and the catechism (Ruiz Berrio 1970, 21).

103. The observation is due to Professor Anne Quartararo (personal communication, August 1993).

104. In his "Memorias" Godoy wrote of Hervás's book, "with the clear and exquisite light that work offered, this teaching [of deaf people] was firmly established and shone brightly not only in the capital of the kingdom, but it was also extended throughout [the realm]" (Godoy [1836] 1956, 212). I have found nothing to support Godoy's claim that Hervás's book exerted any detectable influence on the Friends of the Country, however.

105. The comparison is not exact, however, since Methodical Spanish, unlike the spoken minority tongues, is not a natural language.

1. Prádez's initial request is recorded in ARSEM, Actas, June 1, 1805.

2. Ibid. August 3, 1805.

3. Ibid. August 3 and October 19, 1805.

4. The Actas record that drawing was by then being taught even though the class was not funded because Prádez had offered to teach without compensation (ARSEM, Actas, February 2, 1806). Not until four years later would he be assigned a regular salary.

5. ARABASF, leg. 1-49/3, Memorial de D. Roberto Prádez al Señor Protector solicitando la continuación de una pensión que obtiene de nueve reales diarios, July 28, 1801.

6. ARSEM, Actas, February 2, 1806.

7. Hernández 1815, 104-105. Prádez's Spanish was not letter-perfect, for this same author noted that he had trouble with the use of prepositions—a difficulty to be expected in those whose mother tongue is a signed language. Manual languages often do without prepositions, and spatial relations such as "over," "under," "on," ''next to" may be shown by appropriate positioning of the signs representing the objects in question. The weekly reports Prádez wrote for the school, according to Hernández, ''abounded in sentences that cannot be understood because of their lack of connectives" (83). But even this author found merit in Prádez's accomplishments, observing that "if lacking instruction in the [Spanish] language he has achieved [all that he has], his intellectual progress would be admirable had he had more perfect teaching" (105).

8. By my calculations, Prádez must have been born in 1772. In March 1797 he was twenty-four years old (ARABASF, leg. 3/302, Libro de matrícula), and in July 1799 he was twenty-seven (ARABASF, leg. 2-3/5, Opositores que han presentado obras para este año de 1799). The archives of the archbishopric of Saragossa contain no information about Prádez's birth in that city (according to the archivist there, Arturo Lozano, whose generous efforts on my behalf failed to uncover any record of Roberto Prádez). It may be that Prádez was born in one of the towns of the diocese of Saragossa, or elsewhere in the province.

9. The Imperial Canal extended and intensified older areas of irrigation. In a letter of March 2, 1804, Prádez stated that his father was Pedro Prádez, the builder of the canal (ARABASF, leg. 1-49/3). In 1775 the king granted Pedro Prádez and his company permission to build the canal at their own expense (AHN, Estado, leg. 4,900, Real cédula de su Magestad).

10. A petition from Prádez dated March 26, 1809, identified his father as Pedro Prádez, a native of Béziers, in Languedoc (AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1,182). Prádez is referred to as "son of Don Pedro and Doña Magdalena Gautier" on a list of students of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (ARABASF, leg. 3/302, Libro de matrícula), and similarly, as the son of "Don Pedro and María Gautier" on a list of students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Valencia (ARABASC, Libro I, Matrícula de discípulos, sign. 41, ms, folio 178). Information from the Real Academia de San Carlos was kindly supplied to me by the archivist, Francisco-Javier Delicado Martínez.

11. ARABASF, leg. 1-49/3, Memorial de D. Roberto Prádez al Señor Protector, July 28, 1801, and a letter written by Prádez on March 2, 1804.

12. ARSEM, Actas, February 2, 1806.

13. Alea 1795, 359.

14. The following account, unless otherwise indicated, comes from ARABASF, leg. 1-49/3, Memorial de D. Roberto Prádez al Señor Protector, July 28, 1801, and a letter written by Prádez on March 2, 1804.

15. Prádez's enrollment at that school is recorded in ARABASC (Libro I, Matrícula de discípulos, sign. 41, ms, folio 178). Although his name is listed as "Norberto [ sic ] Prádez," the names of his parents, Don Pedro and Doña María Gautier, and his place of birth, Saragossa, leave little doubt but that this is actually our Don Roberto. He enrolled at the Valencia school in the month of November 1789 (Information provided by Francisco-Javier Delicado Martínez, archivist).

16. Prádez entered the academy on March 5, 1797, at the age of twenty-four (ARABASF, leg. 3/302, Libro de matrícula). The academy had been founded by Felipe V early in the 1700s to promote the study of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music.

17. Santa Fe stated that he had been born in Huesca but educated in Saragossa (Alca 1795, 353). Prádez must have been born in 1772. (see note 2 above). According to Alca, Santa Fe was twenty-two years old in June 1795; it is likely that he had been born either the same year as Prádez or one year later.

18. ARABASF, leg. 1-49/3, letters from Fernando Selma to Isidoro Bosarte, August 2, 1798, and October 9, 1798.

19. Ibid., letter of September 24, 1798.

20. Ibid. The monies came from arbitrios píos, or charity tax. Some years later, the Friends of the Country would try to persuade the king to continue this scholarship to compensate Prádez for teaching an art class at the Royal School, but to no avail (ARSEM, Actas, August 3 and October 19, 1805.

21. ARABASF, leg. 3/125, Actas de juntas particulares, October 7, 1798.

22. Four contestants had originally signed up, but on the day of the contest, Prádez and Boix were the only ones to present their works (ARABASF, leg. 2-3/5).

23. Boix had enrolled on November 18, 1796, when he was twenty-two years old; Prádez had enrolled in March 1797 at the age of twenty-four (ARABASF, leg. 3/302, Libro de matrícula).

24. Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779), German painter whose style is the epitome of neoclassicism. In 1762 he journeyed to Madrid at the invitation of Charles III; five years later he was named primer pintor de cámara .

25. ARABASF, leg. 3/86, Junta general, July 4, 1799.

26. Ibid., Junta pública, July 13, 1799.

27. ARABASF, leg. 3/125, Actas de juntas particulares, August 4, 1799.

28. ARABASF, leg. 1-49/3, letter of from Fernando Selma, July 11, 1799.

29. ARABASF, leg. 5-19/2, Borradores de actas, 1779.

30. ARABASF, leg. 3/125, Actas de juntas particulares, August 5, 1798.

31. "All right," "he's improving," "not bad," ''he's slacking off,'' and "he needs to apply himself" were representative comments. The remarks are recorded in the minutes of the Juntas ordinarias, ibid., leg. 1-23/3, 1-23/4, and leg. 3/86; the years covered are 1798-1804.

32. Ibid., leg. 3/86, Actas de juntas ordinarias, December 4, 1804.

33. ARABASF, leg. 1-49/3, Memorial de Don Roberto Prádez al Señor Protector, July 28, 1801.

34. Ibid., letter from Fernando Selma to Isidoro Bosarte, September 20, 1801.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., letter from Fernando Selma to Isidoro Bosarte, May 10, 1804.

37. ARABASF, leg. 80-1/4, Actas de juntas particulares, August 5, 1804.

38. ARSEM, leg. 203, doc. 6, Relación de las tareas y ocupaciones ... de 1807. The society's archives still contain pupils' sketches of hands, eyes, lips, ears, and so on, made under his guidance.

39. Granell y Forcadell 1932, 42

40. Ibid., 47, 49.

41. Ibid., 50.

42. ARSEM, leg. 206, doc. 7, marginal notes written by Hernández on Loftus's report to the board of directors, December 5, 1809; Alea reporting to the board, January 20, 1810; Loftus to the Economic Society, November 23, 1810.

43. The examination was held on September 10, 1806, and is described in ARSEM, leg. 199, doc. 24, Expediente del examen primero de los colegiales sordomudos. An account also appeared in the Diario de Madrid, November 6, 1806, no. 310, 539-540.

44. See the accounts of the Gaceta de Madrid, 1816, no. 12, 89, and 1824, no. 160, 644. The Royal School's public examinations were no doubt modeled after those of the Paris institute, whose audiences also included people of all walks of life—even royalty.

45. ARSEM, leg. 199, doc. 24.

46. ARSEM, Actas, February 2, 1806.

47. ARSEM, leg. 199, doc. 24.

48. Granell y Forcadell 1932, 45; ARSEM, leg. 195, doc. 6, report of the governing board of August 20, 1805 (which also complained that Loftus often strolled the streets with a single student during class hours—supposedly to teach vocabulary—and left the others in the care of his assistant).

49. ARSEM, leg. 195, doc. 6, letter of June 8, 1805, from Loftus to the society's director.

50. ARSEM, leg. 205, doc. 1, Representación hecha al Rey sobre la enseñanza del Maestro director; ARSEM, Actas, February 11, 1809.

51. ARSEM, leg. 205, doc. 1. Other measures included abolishing the positions of mayordomo and servant.

52. Alea was born on September 29, 1758, to Francisco Alea and Narcisa Abadía (AHDO, sig. 15.8.3, Libro de bautizados, fol. 133). This information was graciously provided to me by the director of the archives, Augustín Hevia Ballín, presbítero. According to testimony Alea produced on at least one occasion, he was an "Old Christian, and descendant of the same"—although as is well known, such claims were often worthless (ADL, Declaración de testigos, leg. 6, 1789). Materials consulted in the Archivo Dioccsano de Lugo were located for me by the archivist, D. Manuel Quiroga, who assisted me greatly with my research there.

53. AHN, Estado, leg. 3,915, undated letter from Alea. Pedro de Quevedo y Quintana (1736-1818) became bishop of Orense in 1776. He was later appointed archbishop of Seville but declined the position. In 1808 he was named Inquisitor General of the Inquisition. That same year Napoleon summoned him to the parliament at Bayonne, but he refused to go. He was appointed to the council of the regency in 1810, but he did not serve because he did not recognize the sovereignty of the nation. Although the Spanish parliament stripped him of his honors in 1812, Ferdinand VII later restored them, and he was made a cardinal in 1816. Known for his virtuous life and numerous acts of charity, Quevedo founded the Seminario Conciliar de San Fernando, as well as a home for foundlings and a girls' school, and during the French Revolution he supported at his own expense hundreds of French priests who had fled to Spain.

54. This, according to a contemporary, Alcalá Galiano (1951 [1878], 72).

55. Letters from Alea of March 31, 1790 (AHN, Estado, leg. 3,234) and of June 7, 1792 (AHN, Estado, leg. 3,915). Alca's learning far surpassed that of most Spanish schoolteachers in elementary schools for hearing children, for the majority had only a primary education and knew little more than what they were required to teach: reading, writing, arithmetic, and of Course, Christian doctrine. A few were familiar with another language or knew some geography, history, Latin, or philosophy. Teachers were required to submit proof of fidelity to king and religion, and proof of conduct in keeping with the highest moral standards. They were also required to certify, that they were Old Christians.

56. Abates were typically more educated than the frailes in religious orders, who suspected the secular clergy of a lack of orthodoxy—and often rightly so, given the latter's penchant for certain French philosophers.

57. He was also assisted financially by a relative, Agustín Victorero, canon of Santiago, who paid Alca one third of his benefice (AHN, Estado, leg. 3,234, letter from Alea of March 31, 1790). A list of Alea's publications and translations appears in Aguilar Piñal 1981, 1:129-133.

58. For the definitions in question, see Alea 1803b. More than once in his work as a translator Alca pointed with pride to his linguistic innovatations. See Alea's comments in Sicard 1807, x-xi, 11 n. 1 and 30 n. 1; and Alea 1804-1805, 39 n. 1.

59. Anyone who has worked at translation can vouch for the accuracy of his observations on "the kind of slavery the original imposes on the talent of the translator, dragging him along in spite of himself and making him express the concepts almost to the letter and word for word, according to how they appear in the work he has before him." Alea himself was not immune to this influence: "I for my part can assure in all truth and without hypocrisy that I am always dominated by the original," he wrote, ''and I have not done nor do I do a version that I don't find here in my mind ways to improve after it is in print" (Alea 1797, 146-147 nn 1-25).

60. Alea 1798.

61. He was also to serve as priest of the neighboring church of San Miguel de Oleiros (ADL, Libro beneficial).

62. Alea stated also that he would be justly compensated for a certain translation he had completed from the French. In the Spanish version, titled Historia de la ú'ltima guerra entre Inglaterra, los Estados Unidos de América, la Francia, España y Holanda, desde el año de 1775, en que se principió hasta el de 1783, en que se concluyó, he explained that he had modified the French version "with extreme care" when it came to "the historical facts pertaining to Spain in the war that just took place with England," replacing strategic portions of the original text with paragraphs copied word for word from Spanish newspaper accounts. Upon completion of the work, he had submitted it to the censors, who had granted him permission to publish. The book was announced in the Gaceta in September 1789, numerous subscribers sent their money, and Alea had 1,000 copies printed at his own expense. But distribution was delayed on the grounds that the contents might be prejudicial to Spanish interests, and Alea, while still owing the printers, was now faced with the prospect of having to return the subscribers' money if the book could not appear—eventually it did (details of the affair in AHN, Estado, leg. 3,234, doc. 20).

63. This interpretation of events was offered by the bishop of Lugo, Felipe Peláez, in a letter of June 8, 1792, to the count of Aranda (AHN, Estado, leg. 3,915).

64. AHN, Estado, leg. 3.,15, letter of June 8, 1792, from the bishop of Lugo to the count of Aranda. A reference to collusion, and fraud as well, also appears in a letter of September 1, 1793, from Alea's relative Agustín Victorero to the bishop (ADL, Mazo 5 de Libros de Civiles de Tradeza).

65. AHN, Estado, leg. 3,915. Portions of Spain were under Moorish domination from 711 to 1492.

66. A letter of May 30, 1792, to the bishop of Lugo stated that Alea had the king's permission to go to Rome during the appeals process, but that if the final decision were in his favor, he would have to either fulfill his priestly duties or give up the benefice. In a letter of June 7,1792, the bishop noted that the parishoners were suffering without a priest and that they were discontent with Tavoada because they recognized the collusion between him and Alea. According to a note in the margin of a letter signed by Alea and dated January 26, 1793, he was granted a passport in February of that same year (ibid.).

67. Letter from Agustín Victorero to the bishop of Lugo, August 17, 1793 (ADL, Mazo 5 de Libros de Civiles de Tradeza). The war in question began in 1793 and ended in 1795.

68. The Real Estudio de Medicina Práctica (Royal Medical School), or Escuela Clínica, was created by a royal order of May 16, 1795; students of medicine were required to attend for twenty-four months.

69. In 1796-1798 Alea was listed in the Kalendario manual y guía de forasteros en Madrid as oficial agregado of the Royal Medical School, and in 1799 he was listed as librarian of this establishment (but from 1800 through 1803 neither Alea nor these positions were mentioned in the Guía ). From 1804 through 1806 he appeared as librarian of the Royal Library and in 1807 as librarian of the Royal Board of Medicine (Real Junta Superior de Medicina) ( Kalendario, 1796-1807). In his Colección española de las obras gramaticales de César Du-Marsais he stated that he was librarian of the Royal Medical School and that he had been appointed to the section of English literature in the Royal Library (Alea 1800-1801, vol. 1, title page).

Details of Alea's application for the post in Santa María de Cortegada and of his request to study Arabic in Rome are to be found in AHN, Estado, leg. 3,915; ADL, Libro beneficial, 1789, 1796; and Mazo 5 de Libros Civiles de Tradeza.

70. Vida del conde de Buffón, a que acompañan el discurso pronunciado al tiempo de su recepción en la Academia Francesa, la relación del viage que Herault de Sechelles hizo a Montbard en 1758 y el elogio fúnebre que a la memoria de su maestro compuso el conde de la Cepéde, su discípulo y continuador, traducida del francés y aumentada con un apéndice y notas por Don J[osé] M[iguel I A[ea] (Madrid: Pantaleón Aznar, 1797).

71. Blanco White 1845, 1:126.

72. Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), French writer and naturalist. Paul et Virginie, his most famous work, first appeared in 1787; it relates the idyllic life of two children brought up on the Ile de France according to the natural system of education predicated by Rousseau. Alea's Spanish translation, first published in 1798, went through numerous printings, and the Bibliothèque Nationale lists seventeen editions, from 1816 to 1891. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was the most influential botanist and natural historian of his day, and the creator of a new system of description of all known animals, plants, and minerals.

73. Nevertheless, in the dedication (Alea 1798) he alluded to a previous favor granted by Godoy, which he characterized only as "also [one] of justice, which Your Excellency administered without knowing me," and for which he expressed his gratitude. Godoy later persuaded the king to send Alea abroad to study ichthyology in order to teach the subject in Spain and occupy a special chair in the Royal Library of Natural History, but apparently neither the trip nor the appointment to the chair of natural history took place—most fortunately for deaf Spaniards.

74. For details of the dispute over publication rights see Alea 1798. In the dedication Alea remarked that "the incense of dedications is wont to smell of flattery and not sincerity because the authors anticipate the reward they expect from the patron to whom they are addressed with vested interest," but stated that his case was different, because he had been the recipient of Godoy's favor without having ever dedicated a line to him. He had not hesitated to curry favor with powerful figures on at least one earlier occasion, however, for he dedicated his translation of the Ciencia del foro o reglas para formar un abogado (Alcalá: Joseph Antonio de Ibarrola, 1789) to Godoy's predecessor, the count of Floridablanca.

75. Namely, his 1800-1801 version of César Chesneau Du Marsais's Des Tropes and his 1807 version of a work by Sicard.

76. Alea 1804c. Variedades de ciencias, literatura y artes was published twice a month from 1803 until 1805. Other contributors included the abate Marchena, Juan Nicasio Gallego, and Eugenio de Tapia—participants all in Quintana's tertulia —as well as Quintana himself. A list of Alea's publications in this magazine appears in Aguilar Piñal 1981, 129-133.

77. Alea 1804c, 217.

78. Ibid., 224.

79. Alea was a member of the committee in charge of the school and was responsible for teaching Christian doctrine to the children two days a week (ARSEM, leg. 199, doc. 33, Reglamento para govierno de la Escuela Pestaloziana, 1806, art. 110). Blanco White too was to teach Christian doctrine (Blanco White 1845, 1:135). The school would be short-lived, a casualty of the coming Napoleonic invasion, but it marked the first time the Spanish government had sponsored an establishment with texts and methodology recognized throughout Europe. The Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) believed that society could be regenerated through education, opposed rote learning, and advocated a structured approach to instruction that proceeded from the simple to the complex—ideas Alea and his enlightened comrades no doubt welcomed.

80. He judged Condillac to be "the least deluded metaphysician known to Europe," although the Englishman John Locke was "the one who, in my opinion, has fewest defects among all the authors who have examined the human understanding" (Alea 1795, 323; Alea n.d., vol. 1, tratado tercero. n. 6).

81. César Du Marsais, Colección española de las obras gramaticales de César Du-Marsais . Vol. 1, Tratado de los tropos (Madrid: Aznar, 1800-1801), was a Spanish adaptation of César Chesneau Du Marsais, Traité des tropes (Leipzig, 1757); the book was dedicated to its sponsor, Godoy. In his edition Alea employed an innovative technique of contrastive analysis, which he considered "as useful for the reader as it is difficult for the translator," confessing that the endeavor had required a "certain degree of mental application of which I myself had not formed an accurate idea until I began to experience it" (Alea 1800-1801, 1:xi). Alea replaced Du Marsais's examples from French writers with comparable examples from Spanish men of letters and included the French originals in footnotes; justifiably proud of the approach he had devised, he urged teachers to have their students study the differences between the two languages. ''I am so persuaded that this technique will be of transcendental usefulness to the two languages, that I do not fear appealing in this question to the testimony of future experience, nor do I expect to be found unworthy of the approval of learned men of both nations."

82. Ibid., 1:5. José Miguel Alea, Breve idea del objeto y plan de esta colección, 5, in César Du Marsais 1800-1801, vol. 1.

83. The original work by Du Marsais was Logique, ou Réflexions sur les principales opérations de l'esprit (Paris, 1792). Alea wrote, "I have interrupted the work in which I have been occupied for some time, I mean, the formation of principles of general grammar, applied to the Castilian language, a work which our literature lacks, and which is necessary for its progress and for the perfection of our language" (Alea 1807, vii).

84. Alea 1800-1801, 1:1.

85. "[The aurora of light] later spread through all Europe with the birth of the celebrated Englishman [Sir Francis] Bacon," Alea concluded (ibid., 1:8). Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas (1523-1600), Spanish grammarian and humanist whose writings would influence subsequent general grammarians. The work Alea referred to was Sánchez's Minerva seu de causis linguae latinae (Salamanca: Renaut fratres, 1587).

86. Alea 1800-1801, 1:9-10, 12. Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), Charles Pinot Duclos (1704-1772.), John Harris (1666-1719), Nicolas Beauzée (1717-1789), Charles Eugène Thurot (1768-1832), César Chesneau Du Marsais (1676-1756).

87. Indeed, he had remarked elsewhere that white the "marvelous art" of teaching deaf people had been invented by Ponce, it had been "highly perfected later among foreigners" (Alea 1807, ii).

88. Alea 1800-1801, 1:5.

89. Specifically, the author of the letter criticized Alea's translation of bourgeon as "yema o botón de viña" (vineyard bud or shoot), suggesting that the appropriate Spanish phrase was "yema o botón de vid" (grapevine bud or shoot); one of Alea's Spanish examples seemed to him inappropriate in light of the original French; and he disapproved of the use of the word española in the title Colección española, arguing that it was inaccurately applied to a work of foreign origin (Carta de Don P. de C. a Alea, in Alea 1800-1801, vol. 2, n.p.) Alea accepted the first two criticisms and conceded that Colección en español, that is, "Collection in Spanish," might have been better than "Spanish collection.'' Nevertheless he defended his choice of Colección española, arguing that because the edition contained examples drawn from Spanish authors, it should be considered truly ''Spanish" (first three pages of Alea's response, in Alea 1800-1801, vol. 2, n.p.).

90. Diario de Madrid, December 8, 1801; Alea 1801.

91. Alea 1801, 1406.

92. First page of Alea's response, in Alea 1800-1801, vol. 2, n.p.

93. Ibid., fourth page of Alea's response.

94. The author who recorded this incident noted that he used it as the basis for a poem entitled "La abatomaquia," which out of deference to Quintana, he never published (Mor de Fuentes [1836] 1951, 75-77).

95. Granell y Forcadell 1932, 40.

96. Sicard's manual, Cours d'instruction d'un sourd-muet de naissance (Paris: Le Clère, 1800), was a detailed account of how he had gone about teaching his prize student, Jean Massieu. In the introduction to the Spanish version, Alea revealed that he had used Sicard's method to teach Josef González (Alea 1807, vi).

97. Roch-Ambroise Sicard, Lecciones analíticas, trans. José Miguel Alea (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1807). The Friends of the Country made Alea a socio de mérito with the understanding that he would translate Sicard's other works on deaf education, as well as other foreign works on the subject that the board might request (ARSEM, leg. 200, doc. 13).

98. Alea 1803a.

99. Destutt de Tracy's claims were advanced in his 1798 Mémoire sur la faculté de penser ( Mémoires de l'Institut National des Sciences et Arts pour l'an IV de la République: Sciences Morales et Politiques [Paris: Baudouin, 1798], 1:283-450, cited in Lane 1984, 59), although he would later retract them in his 1803 Eléments d'idéologie (Paris: Courcier, 1803), asserting that a gesture or a cry can express an abstract idea just as a word can (cited in Alea 1804-1805, 44). When Alea published his 1803 article in Variedades, he was already aware that the French ideologue had revised his opinion, although he refrained from saying so, as he later explained, "firstly, so as to show how difficult it is for the greatest people of talent to form quickly and without the benefit of experience a theory that explains all the phenomena of thought; and secondly, because what Destutt de Tracy said about the sufficiency of a gesture or a cry to express an abstract idea should not be received as an ideological proof," since he did not indicate that he had performed the experiment himself or that he had attended classes for deaf children at the Paris school. Alea conjectured that the philosopher had doubtless arrived at this conclusion at the Paris institute, "despite his silence regarding this matter" (Alea 1804-1805, 44). Ramón Campos's work, eventually published under the title El don de la palabra (Madrid: Gómez Fuentenebro, 1804), is discussed in the text below.

100. Alea 1803a, 104.

101. This move was in keeping with Alea's almost boundless faith in the benefits of empirical science applied to the study of humankind: "The science of facts and the empirical study of the human heart will produce, perhaps a few centuries from now, the general felicity of the species, if the forces of ignorance do not extinguish the lights of philosophy," he asserted (Alea n.d., 1:66-67 n.).

102. Alea 1803a, 102 n. 1. Alea believed that the results of this experiment, in addition to dispelling any doubts about deaf-mutes' capacity for abstract thought, would also help determine just how much could be expected of their education. Although the author intended to publish his conclusions, apparently he never did.

103. Alea 1803a, 103 n.

104. Alea 1804a, 42-53, 109-120.

105. Alea 1804a, 49, 50, 117. Successive page references in the text are from this same source.

106. Alea 1795, 260, 261.

107. "And these and other facts which I have collected for publication with the corresponding analysis, I believe will shed new light on this part of rational ideology," Alea added (Alea 1804a, 112-113 n. 1). As far as I know, however, he did not publish this account.

108. Ibid., 113 n. 1.

109. Alea had observed elsewhere that contrary to popular belief, which held that teachers instill ideas in deaf students as if by magic, their instruction was actually achieved by dint of appropriate technique, hard work, and patience, exactly as with hearing children (Alea 1803a, 111).

110. Alea 1804a, 113-114 n. 1.

111. Alea's article, a criticism of Campos's El don de la palabra, appeared in three issues of Variedades (Alea 1804-1805). Ramón Campos Pérez was born sometime between 1755 and 1770 in Burriana (Castellón) and studied at the Colegio de San Fulgencio in Murcia, where upon completing his studies he occupied first the chair of theology, then the chair of physics; he subsequently held the latter position at the Reales Estudios de San Isidro in Madrid as well. In addition to El don de la palabra, Campos authored Sistema de lógica (Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra, 1792), La economía reducida a principios exactos, claros y sencillos (Madrid: Benito Cano, 1797), and De la desigualdad personal en la sociedad civil (Barcelona: Manuel Saurí, 1838). His life was marked by numerous runins with the Inquisition (see the text and note 130 below). He died in Belmonte (Cuenca) in 1808, fighting against the French.

112. Alea 1804-1805, 226. Alea had wished to publish the results of his study at a later date and in another form, but the appearance of Campos's book precipitated this reply. "We found ourselves obliged to speak suddenly, and without the method we had proposed, on a matter whose subtle examination we had set aside for more deliberation, and with greater rigor and at greater length," he explained (107-108). Elsewhere in this same article the author made clear his intentions to publish more on the subject, in particular in reply to Garat, de Gérando, Destutt de Tracy, and Sicard, but apparently he never did (38 n. 1, 45, 48).

113. Campos 1804, 112.

114. Alea 1804-1805, 39. Successive page references in the text are from this same source.

115. Curiously, although Alea recognized that deaf people themselves invent abstract signs, he nevertheless stated elsewhere in this same article that "artificial figures and gestures can be suitable signs to denote all kinds of ideas, provided they are invented by those who already know a spoken language, since each one of these signs is nothing but the translation of the idea corresponding to the word in spoken language" (230-231; emphasis mine).

116. While holding that deaf people were capable of abstract thought before learning a language, Alea nevertheless maintained that they were incapable of abstract ideas "of a certain order," because they were limited to the most basic elements of language. It followed for Alea that the same was true of hearing individuals who had not yet learned a language, given the common organization of man (ibid., 38).

117. For an early discussion of a writing system for French Sign Language, see Roch-Ambroise Bébian, "Essay on the Deaf and Natural Language, or Introduction to a Natural Classification of Ideas with Their Proper Signs," in Lane 1984, 141-144. For recent efforts to devise a writing system for sign language, e.g., see Salk Institute 1987; Hutchins, Poizner, McIntire, and Newkirk 1990; Prillwitz and Zienert 1990; Sutton 1990.

118. Alea 1804-1805, 39.

119. "The language of action with which deaf-mutes are taught is nothing but the translation of the spoken language learned by those who teach them in the country of their birth," he wrote, leaving no doubt about what type of signs he advocated for instruction (ibid., 102).

120. Speakers narrating stories in either American Sign Language or English do so at a rate of about forty propositions per minute (Lane 1992, 181).

121. Campos, El don de la palabra, cited in Alea 1804-1805, 42.

122. Ibid., 344.

123. Ibid., 43.

124. Ibid. Indeed, Alea went so far as to propose founding an establishment for deaf students "where certain experiments could be done that have not been done until now, and which are not feasible in the existing schools for deaf-mutes," asserting that "the undertaking would be new, useful, and very worthy of the protection of a powerful prince, a patron of the sciences" (48 n).

125. Ibid., 98 n. 1.

126. Alea's comment was provoked by Campos's claim that at the time of the Moorish domination of Spain, Arabic was a primitive language that had only proper names and the names of events. Alea asked, "Can Campos perhaps be unaware that the Arabic language was then, and long before, in the highest state of development, and that it had an abundance of terms to express the most subtle abstract and general ideas?" (ibid., 350-351).

127. Ibid., 284. Others have been less charitable in their judgment: Menéndez y Pelayo, nineteenth-century Spain's major literary historian and critic, saw in Campos's work "the outer limit of philosophical degradation," declaring that "it is not possible to descend any lower" (Menéndez y Pelayo [1881] 1956, 2:605-606).

128. AHN, Inquisición, leg. 3,735, exp. 265, cited in Mas Galvañ's introduction (Campos [1799] 1989, 35).

129. Ibid. This introduction includes a biography of Campos and documents his various scrapes with the Inquisition.

130. Campos had been arrested in October 1797, and the following May he was sent to Malaga. He complained bitterly of the conditions of his imprisonment there. "My cell," he wrote, "is a single ground-floor room four and one half varas wide and five varas long with a garret-like ceiling" (one vara = 2.8 feet). But the governor of Malaga reported that Campos spent most of his time in cafés and billiard halls (AHN, Estado, leg. 3,014). After his release in 1802 Campos went to Madrid. In 1799 he submitted his De la desigualdad personal en la sociedad civil to Godoy, who reacted favorably to the manuscript, but it was later censured by one Mariano Urquijo. The author was denied permission to publish his tract (it was said to be of little value and to contain much plagiarism), and he was told to desist in his efforts at writing such works (AHN, Estado, leg. 3,014). The book did not appear in print until 1823, when it was published in France (Paris: Rodríguez Burón, 1823). A second edition appeared in Spain (1838) and a third in Venezuela (1840).

131. Campos 1989 (1799), 59. Campos's treatise was most likely a reply to Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam: M. M. Rey, 1755).

132. Ibid.

133. Alea 1804-1805, 44-45.

134. Alea singled out King Joseph I of Portugal for special praise, lauding his decree that blacks should be treated as free subjects, eligible for all that nation's honors and distinctions (Alea n.d., 2:75 n.).

135. In 1806 one member of the Friends of the Country described him as a "very diligent individual, and well informed about the literary area concerning grammar in general, and particularly the language of deaf-mutes" (ARSEM, leg. 200, doc. 13).

136. ARSEM, Actas, February 17, 1809.

137. ARSEM, leg. 206, doc. 7; leg. 209, doc. 18.

138. ARSEM, leg. 206, doc. 7.

139. Ibid.

140. AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1,182, report of Alea, March 26, 1809. In this same document Alea observed, "Education and correction should be paternal in order that they may produce the wholesome effects that are desired. In the five months and twenty-two days that the board directed the instruction and education of the school, the students were docile, and they suffered the punishments imposed on them for their misdeeds without a murmur, because they were [imposed] without a spirit of revenge, and proportionate to the offense."

Reports of mistreatment occurred as early as 1806, when one of the paying students, Francisco de Sales Entero, gave a note to a member of the society stating that "the head teacher threatens me at all hours and I am resolved to leave if Your Grace does not remedy the situation" (AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg.

1,182). In March 1807 the spiritual director reported that the youth had left the school (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 47). And in August 1807 he was expelled following a suicide attempt (ARSEM, leg. 202, doc. 14).

141. AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1,182, letter from Loftus, April 29, 1809.

142. Ibid., March 31, 1809.

143. Ibid., April 29, 1809.

144. Ibid., March 31, 1809.

145. Ibid., April 29, 1809, and March 31, 1809.

146. Ibid., March 31, 1809, and April 29, 1809.

147. ARSEM, leg. 209, doc. 18, December 17, 1810.

148. AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1,182, letter from Loftus, February 22, 1811.

149. ARSEM, leg. 212, doc. 21.

150. Diario de Barcelona, January 23, 1815.

151. Granell y Forcadell 1932, 51, 158.

152. AHB, Gobernación, expediente 2821, año 1853, Expediente relativo a proveer por medio de concurso la plaza de Maestro de la escula de sordomudos. The commission in charge of selecting the new teacher opined that Machado had "given proof that he possesses very scanty knowledge and of his notorious ineptitude for teaching deaf-mutes."

153. AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1,182, letter to Loftus of February 23, 1811.

154. Corral 1985, 75.

155. ARSEM, leg. 208, doc. 4, Relación de las tareas de la Real Sociedad Económica de Madrid, 1812. Financial difficulties were common to many of Spain's educational establishments, for owing to the weakened condition of the economy, state mandated subsidies often failed to materialize. By the end of the reign of Charles IV, the national debt was considerable, and it increased still more during the reign of Ferdinand VII, when considerable sums were expended on the war with France and the defense of Spain's colonies in America. For discussion see Ruiz Berrio 1970, ch. 4.

156. ARSEM, Actas, September 17, 1808.

157. ARSEM, leg. 212, doc. 11, February 26, 1811. Although he originally signed on as a servant, Ugena rose to the rank of teaching assistant and then professor, remaining in the school's employ through 1848.

158. AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-6.

159. Eventually the hearing servant, Antonio Ugena, and a seventh deaf student would be lodged there as well (ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 19). The school of San Ildefonso had been founded in the fifteenth century; its pupils were orphans and children of impoverished families.

Roberto Prádez began teaching at the Royal School for free, but in 1810 he was assigned a salary of six reales per day—one third less than the scholarship he had received as a student at the Academy of San Fernando. During the war years he was not paid with any kind of regularity, despite his numerous requests for financial assistance and the Friends of the Country's repeated assurances of his "merit, diligence, and good conduct" (AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1,182, communication from the Corregidor of the Minister of the Interior, January 21, 1812; AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-4, letter of June 7, 1812, from Roberto Prádez to the corregidor of Madrid; letter of June 15, 1812, from the Minister of the Interior to the corregidor; AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-6, petition from Roberto Prádez and Antonio Ugena to the Ayuntamiento of Madrid, September 2, 1813; AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1, 182, comments accompanying a petition from Prádez to the Ministry of the Interior, January 29, 1811). According to the municipality, "When the school relocated to San Ildefonso, he was considered as a student in the eyes of our nation, and in that capacity he has moved to the Hospicio"; it followed that he would not be paid a salary (AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-4, report of June 26, 1812.). As for the Friends of the Country, they simply had no funds, and during the war they washed their hands of financial responsibility for the school's pupils and staff alike (see the text below). Antonio Ugena, the hearing employee who joined Prádez and the students at San Ildefonso, was also denied financial compensation during these years, despite his repeated appeals (AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1, 182, communication from the corregidor of Madrid to the Minister of the Interior, January 21, 1812.; AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-6, petition from Roberto Prádez and Antonio Ugena to the Ayuntamiento of Madrid, September 2., 1813). Hernández, the society's censor, would comment that while Prádez and Ugena's requests for back pay were "extremely just," they were misdirected, since the society was no longer responsible for administration of the school, adding that the two men were at least being fed, which was more than could be said for others in those times (ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34, comments of Hernández, April 30, 1812).

160. Ibid., doc. 6, Representación de la Sociedad al Exmo. Ministro del Interior sobre la triste situación en que hoy se hallan los sordomudos, June 17, 1811.

161. Ibid., doc. 7, letter from Domingo Agüero. In one document the deaf youths were said to be between the ages of fourteen and nineteen (AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-6); in another they were said to be between seventeen and thirty (AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1, 182, July 11, 1811).

162. AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-6.

163. ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 6, Representación, June 17, 1811.

164. Ibid., doc. 7, August 21, 1811.

165. Ibid.

166. Ibid., doc. 6, June 17, 1811.

167. Ibid., April 6, 1811. The decision had been taken despite the opposition of one of its members, Hernández.

168. ARSEM, leg. 212, doc. 22, September 28, 1811.

169. AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1, 182, letter from various members of the Friends of the Country to the Minister of the Interior, October 30, 1811. In 1803 the king, with an eye to ensuring that poor students were prepared to become self-sufficient, instructed the society to teach them a trade (as discussed in chapter 4), but by 1811 this provision still had not been implemented.

170. ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 17, June 18, 1811. The society still intended, however, to fulfill certain obligations toward the students, such as seeing to it that they received religious instruction.

171. ARSEM, Actas, November 9, 1811.

172. AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1, 182, January 21, 1812.

173. AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-6.

174. ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34, comments of Hernández, April 30, 1812.

175. AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-6.

176. ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34, letter from Antonio Ugena, August 22, 1812.

177. ARSEM, leg. 218, doc. 3.

178. Mesonero y Romanos 1881b, 1:86.

179. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), Spanish painter and engraver, was born in Fuendetodos, near Saragossa. Eventually he settled in Madrid, becoming a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1780, and assistant director five years later. He was named painter to the king in 1786 and rose to the position of first court painter. A serious illness in 1792-1793 left him totally and incurably deaf. Goya may well have crossed paths with Roberto Prádez, a fellow native of the Saragossa region, during the deaf youth's student days at the Academy of San Fernando.

180. ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34, letter from Antonio Ugena, August 22, 1812.

181. ARSEM, leg. 221, doc. 4, December 20, 1814.

182. Alea 1788, 26.

183. AP, Sección histórica, Gobierno intruso, carp. 71, expediente 6. Alea's appointment as Archivero general de la Corona was recorded on March 10, 1809.

184. This, according to Hans Juretschke, who attributes to Alea numbers 50, 56, 61, 111, 112, and 113 of the year 1811 (Juretschke 1962, 187, 188 n. 135). The articles I have been able to locate (numbers 50, 56, 61, 110, 112.) are signed simply "J.A."

185. Ibid., 156.

186. Gómez Imaz 1910, 167. A detailed inventory signed by Alea and Antonio Aboza and dated June 2, 1810, lists 999 canvases by masters such as Zurbarán, Murillo, Roelas, Valdés Leal, Herrera, Alonso Cano, and Pacheco—the best of each artist.

187. ARSEM, leg. 2. 13, doc. 31, petition of November 30, 1811, from Antonio Ugena; ibid., doc. 34, letter of August 22, 1812, from Antonio Ugena.

188. The last time Alea's name occurred in the society's records seems to be on January 30, 1813 (ARSEM, Actas), and in that same year his name also disappeared from the roster of personnel at the school.

189. In France Alea published, among other things, a French version of the Cartas marruecas by the celebrated Spanish essayist, poet, and military man José Cadalso (1741-1782) ( Nouveau cours analytique de langue espagnole: Lettres de Maroc, écrites en espagnol par le Colonel don Joseph Cadalso, ed. Alea [Marseilles: Feissat aîné of Demonchy, 1831]). The edition also contained a philosophical analysis of Cervantes's Don Quixote and an essay on the "restauration de la Langue et des Lettres en Espagne," both authored by Alea. After the war Alea also translated Celia y Rosa (Valencia: Imprenta de Estévan, 1817), by the French author Sophie de Senneterre de Renneville, and La juventud ilustada, o las virtudes y los vicios, by the French writer Adelaïde-Gillete Bylet Dufresnoy (Paris: Cormon y Blanc, 1827). The latter, a collection of writings by famous moralists concerning the virtues and vices, Alea intended for his students' use.

190. Eloge de l'abbé de l'Epée, ou essai sur les avantages du systéme des signes méthodiques 1824. This work was later translated into Dutch by Charles and Rembt Tobie Guyot (Guyot and Guyot [1842] 1967, 12 n.).

191. Alea also argued, as he had done elsewhere, that deaf people are as capable of conceiving abstract ideas as are the hearing, and that sign language is as appropriate for the expression of ideas as is spoken language. In 1808 the abate had read a paper before the Friends of the Country outlining the improvements Sicard's analytical method had brought to primary education (ARSEM, leg. 204, doc. 3) (I have been unable to locate a copy of this paper). Interestingly, the education plan presented to the society in 1819 and signed by the duke of Híjar and seven other members also suggested that the method for teaching hearing children to read should be a modified version of the method used with their deaf counterparts ( Plan de educación del Duque de Híjar, cited in Ruiz Berrio 1970, 124).

192. Bébian's winning essay (1819) criticized the system of manual French employed by de l'Epée and Sicard, advocating instead French Sign Language as the medium of instruction. The judgment of the Marseilles Academic Circle appears in Alea 1824, 122-124 n. 9.

193. Alea 1824, 89 n. a. To the best of my knowledge, the dictionary was never published.

194. In 1824 he mentioned his intention to do so, however (ibid., 89 n. a).

195. The Histoire du lycée de Marseille lists Alea as professor of Spanish from 1827 to 1830, and as professor of Portuguese in 1830 (Delmas 1898, 54). Another source refers to Alea as a professor of Spanish at the Collège Royal from 1828 through 1830 (Archives départementales des Bouches-duRhône, Cote du document: A 2338. Collège Royal de Marseille 1825-1836. Distribution solennelle des prix faire au Collège Royal de Marseille [Université Royale de France, Académie d'Aix, 1828-1830]) (The Lycée de Marseille was originally known as the Collège Royal). This information was provided by Caroline Fernández, who conducted archival research on Alea in Marseilles in my behalf.

According to Guyot and Guyot, after living for a time in Marseilles and Paris, Alea traveled to the Netherlands in 1829, by royal concession (Guyot and Guyot [1842] 1967, 38 n.).

196. Suárez states only that Alea died in poverty in Bordeaux (Suárez 1936, 1:159); Menéndez y Pelayo reports that he threw himself in the Garonne (Menéndez y Pelayo [1881] 1956, 2:638), while Alea's contemporary José Mor de Fuentes (1762-1848) writes that "it seems he threw himself in the Rhône," allegedly because of ill-treatment received at the hands of a fellow afrancesado in whose employ the abate had lived for years in Marseilles (Mor de Fuentes [1836] 1951, 77). Mor de Fuentes visited Bordeaux in 1833 and Paris the following year but apparently did not go to Marseilles; he may have learned of Alea's death during this trip (recall that the abate was employed in Marseilles at the Collège Royal up through 1830). Albert Dérozier casts doubt on some of the details of Mor's account, which concludes with an Englishman, "enamored by another route than that which Iberians around here usually follow, captivated by such exotic attraction," that he journeyed from London to the same precipice from which Alea had supposedly leaped to hurl himself after him (Mor de Fuentes [1836] 1951, 77). Dérozier remarks that "as usual, the imagination imposes its laws on the veracity of [this] story" (Dérozier 1978, 147 n. 77); it is worth bearing in mind that Mor was renowned for his brutal attacks on literary figures, politicians, and others.

197. Alea's successor, Tiburcio Hernández, omits any mention of the abate, although for nearly a decade the two had been thrown together as members of the Royal School's governing board (Hernández 1814, 1815, 1816, 1821).

1. The former Calle del Turco is the present-day Marqués de Cubas.

2. Tiburcio Hernández Hernández Pérez Durán y López Adán was born in Alcalá de Henares (AHN, Universidades, Alcalá de Henares, Academia de San Justo y Pastor, Libros de matrícula, nos. 584-590). He joined the Economic Society in February 1804, and he was named to the governing board of the Royal School in January 1808 (ARSEM, leg. 204, doc. 1).

3. Hernández had earned a degree in law at the University of Alcalá de Henares in 1795. As a member of the Colegio de Abogados, he assisted the government and the courts in preparation of legal briefs. His work as relator of the Sala de Alcaldes included redacting summaries of cases that appeared before that body.

4. Tiburcio Hernández married Crispina Blancas on October 14, 1796, in the Iglesia Parroquial de San Sebastían in Madrid; a daughter, María Antonia Jacoba Silvestra Manuela, was born on December 30, 1806, and a son, Antonio Fernando Modesto Vicente Francisco de Paula, on June 15, 1809 (AHN, Hacienda, leg. 532).

5. At his death on January 10, 1826, Hernández was fifty-three years old (ibid.). If his birthday was after January 10, the year of his birth would have been 1772, the same year in which Roberto Prádez was born. Alea had been born in 1758.

6. Respuesta de D. José Miguel Alea, in Alea 1800-1801, at end of vol. 2, n.p.; ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34.

7. ARSEM, doc. 4.982, cited in Ruiz Berrio 1970, 125-126.

8. Hernández 1816, 26, 4-5.

9. Ibid., iv-v.

10. Ibid., i.

11. Hernández, ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34. Granell records that Hernández submitted his instructional plan to the Junta in October 1809 (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 53), and Hernández himself confirmed that the work was completed in that year (Hernández 1815, foreword).

12. ARSEM, leg. 208, doc. 4, Relacíon de las tareas de la Real Sociedad Económica de Madrid, 1812; ARSEM, leg. 212, doc. 14 and doc. 22; ARSEM, Actas, February 9 and February 11, 1811.

13. ARSEM, leg. 219, doc. 6; ARSEM, Actas, April 2, 1814.

14. Hernández 1815, 55.

15. Ibid., iv.

16. The report of the committee that approved Hernández's Plan noted with apparent discomfort that the method had not been tested, for the author had been unable to try out his approach on account of the recent political upheaval (ARSEM, leg. 219, doc. 6).

17. Hernández 1814, 6; Bonet [1620] 1930, 249. The same was true of Lasso, as discussed in chapter 1.

18. So reasoned Hernández (1814, 8): "Their cure," he wrote, "consists in giving them the ability to distinguish, that is to say, to analyze, articulated sounds, if the ailment resides only in the organs of the ear; and if it occupies these and those of the voice as well, then both must be rehabilitated."

19. Ibid., 20, 13.

20. Hernández 1815, v.

21. Ibid. The Friends of the Country's interest in the topic antedated Hernández's experiments: in 1805 it was reported that one member, a Sr. San Martín, had proposed the use of galvanism, or direct-current electricity, on the students, hoping to cure their deafness; Alea, who had already tried out galvanism himself, supported the proposal and offered to help (ARSEM, leg. 195, doc. 2, June 7, 1805). The Friends of the Country also read of attempted cures in the French press and named a commission to evaluate the experiments (ARSEM, leg. 202, doc. 14, Noticia, 1806).

22. Hernández 1815, vi-vii.

23. Hernández's report, February 21, 1809, reproduced in ibid., viii. The entire report is reproduced here, vi-x.

24. Madrid capitulated on the morning of December 4, 1808.

25. Report, February 21, 1809, reproduced in Hernández 1815, ix.

26. Ibid., x.

27. Granell y Forcadell 1932, 46.

28. Hernández 1814, 10. Hernández claimed it did not matter that others might dispute him the glory of having initiated the search for a cure; the important thing, he concluded, was to bring it about (10-11).

29. Although he now seemed ready to leave future experiments to "wise professors" (ibid., 10-11).

30. Hernández 1816, 23.

31. Hernández 1815, 112.

32. "In the schools there should be pictures of human heads in the act of pronouncing the vowels, diphthongs, and all the syllables that are necessary to speak Spanish. For the pronunciation of each letter and syllable there should be a head, in which is clearly delineated the configuration of the articulatory organs upon pronouncing the letters or syllables," Hervás wrote (Hervás y Panduro 1795, 2:195). The same idea was put forth by Hernández in 1815 (13), but apparently it was not implemented at the Madrid school until 1870 when the director, Nebreda y López, had the drawings made—once again without acknowledging the intellectual debt to Hervás or to Hernández either (Nebreda y López 1870c). Unnumbered pages in his Tratado teórico-práctico para la enseñanza de la pronunciación de los sordo-mudos contain engravings of a young male pronouncing the various sounds of Spanish, accompanied by the corresponding block and cursive letters and their respective representations in the manual alphabet.

33. Hernández 1815, 7. Successive page references in the text are to Hernández 1815.

34. Hernández 1816, 18-20.

35. Such a strategy is clearly necessary, for a large percentage of articulated speech cannot be gleaned from the movement of the lips alone, regardless of the intelligence of the speech reader.

36. Needless to say, the remark reveals a great deal about Hernández's opinion of deaf people.

37. Bonet [1620] 1930, 159-165, 166-168.

38. Hernández 1816, 6.

39. Ibid., 8.

40. Ibid., 16.

41. ARSEM, Actas, November 15, 1820.

42. Granell y Forcadell 1932, 123.

43. Hernández 1821c, 8.

44. Hernández 1816, 16.

45. Hernández 1821c, 7. Successive page references in the text are to Hernández 1821c.

46. Hernández 1816, 19.

47. Ibid., 22.

48. ARSEM, leg. 233, doc. 13, October 1816.

49. ARSEM, leg. 234, doc. 5, February 22, 1816.

50. ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34.

51. Reglamento of 1818, art. 33, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 95; the whole document is reproduced on 93-104.

52. Hernández 1816, 6.

53. The Madrid school during this era was not able to provide its students with the preparation Hernández advocated, however, for workshops had yet to be established, as discussed in the text below.

54. Reglamento of 1818, art. 32, 109, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 95, 102.

55. In 1820 there were some twenty-eight to thirty students (AV, Secretaría, leg. 2-371-10, letter of July 17, 1820, from Hernádez). Another-document from the same year listed six colegiales de número (regular students), plus two supernumerarios (''extra'' students), two caballeros pudientes (well-to-do students), fourteen pensionistas (boarders), and one asistente a clase (day student), for a total of twenty-five students (ARSEM, leg. 267, on the public examination of November 15, 1820).

56. Reglamento of 1818, art. 20, 22, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 94.

57. ARSEM, leg. 233, doc. 15, February 24, 1816; articles 19-32, 34, 58-64, of the Reglamento of 1818, reproduced in Granell y Forcadell 1932, 94-95, 97-98.

58. Hernández 1821c; Gazeta, de Madrid, December 21, 1824, no. 160, 644. Granell states that their teaching was established as early as 1817, although it was imparted privately (Granell y Forcadell 193, 2, 117).

59. Reglamento of 1818, art. 17, reproduced in ibid., 94, 118

60. As was reported to the society on October 8, 1814 (ibid., 62).

61. ARSEM, leg. 243, doc. 25, petition of Roberto Prádez, January 29, 1818.

62. Ibid., Hernández, February 6, 1818. I have found no record of how the dispute was finally resolved.

63. E.g., see ARSEM, leg. 106, doc. 18; leg. 232, doc 1; leg. 279, doc. 1.

64. Granell y Forcadell 1932, 209.

65. In 1812. one document listed him as "relator de la Junta Criminal" (ARSEM, leg. 208, doc. 4).

66. Ruiz Berrio 1970, 119.

67. AGS, Gobierno intruso, leg. 1.182, documents of May 1, 1809, August 14, 1809, and September 250, 1809. While Loftus was suspended from his post as head teacher at the Royal School, he twice brought charges against members of the Junta, and Angel Machado did so once.

68. ARSEM, leg. 213, doc. 34, report from Hernández.

69. AV, Secretaría, 2-4-1-56, Indice alfabético de acuerdos de purificaciones del Ayuntamiento constitucional al contado desde 28 de junio de 1813 a 9 de mayo de 1814. I have been unable to locate the agreements themselves. All who accepted employment under the French government were officially considered collaborators, even though many had done so out of necessity. Thus, as a teacher at the Royal School, Prádez too was apparently in need of "purification," for he had been in the employ of the invader.

70. Hernández was a lawyer to the Reales Consejos and relator of the Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte from 1805 through 1815, retiring in 1816, according to one source (AHN, Hacienda, leg. 532.). Another source lists him as retiring in 1817 from the Sala de Alcaldes and as drawing a full pension until 1822 (AHN, Consejos, libro 1814, vol. 1, fol. 1057). He was awarded the title of Auditor de Guerra in 1820 (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 107).

71. Gaceta de Madrid, 1816, no. 12, 89, cited in Ruiz Berrio 1970, 278. As a consequence of this visit, the crown allocated more financial support to the school.

72. "In the year [18]13 he cursed the constitution ... submissive before despotism he snatched 18,000 reales in retirement pension [from the Sala de Alcaldes] and the honors of auditor, " Hernández's critic wrote, going on to express astonishment that he could now don the hat of an exalted liberal (Elizalde [1822?], 96).

73. Hernández 1821b.

74. Although he had ceased to practice law, apparently he had not lost interest in the criminal justice system, as evidenced by his publication in 1820 of Principios acerca de prisiones, conforme a nuestra Constitución y las leyes (Madrid 1810), cited in Palau y Dulcet 1948-1977, 6:560. I have been unable to consult this work.

75. Hernández 1821a, 3.

76. Vinuesa was the author of tracts such as Preservativo contra la irreligión (Preventive against irreligion), Preservativo contra el espirítu público de la Gaceta de Madrid y otros periódicos (Preventive against the public spirit of the Gaceta de Madrid and other newspapers), and El grito de un español verdadero (The cry of a real Spaniard).

77. Hernández 1821a, 3.

78. Ibid., 22.

79. Aguirre 1841, 201.

80. Red. Gral. de España, no. 270 (280), May 5, 1821, 320, cited in Gil Novales 1975, 1:614.

81. The attempt at counterrevolution was not confined to Madrid, for uprisings also occurred around this same time in other parts of the peninsula as well. Their lack of synchronization contributed to the liberal triumph.

82. The society met on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evenings in the refectory of the then-dissolved convent of Santo Tomás. At the front of the hall stood a monument with the dedication, "To the memory of the immortal Landáburu," and on the walls were inscriptions Such as "Liberty and Union," "Firmness and Valor,'' and "Sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.'' Soldiers were present to keep order, and between speeches a military band played patriotic airs. In the words of an English visitor, Michael J. Quin, "There was no topic afloat in the capital that was interesting to the people which they did not discuss in all its bearings. Every night fresh crowds filled the hall. Like all large assemblies, they seemed verging constantly towards extremes, denouncing those who did not meet their wishes in every point, impatient of moderate measures, fickle in their admiration, and atrocious in their hatreds" (Quin 1824, 71). Speeches delivered there exerted a powerful influence on residents of the capital and indeed, the entire country. Small wonder, then, that those in power, sensitive to Landaburians' virulent denunciations of the government, soon found a pretext to close the society. The convent of Santo Tomás was declared to be in ruinous condition and consequently unsafe, and in February 1823 the doors were boarded shut. According to Quin, however, "The fact was, there was not a more firm or durable building in Madrid" (199).

83. Ibid., 71, 67; session of December 8, 1822, reported in the Indicador, no. 221, 1024-1026, cited in Gil Novales 1975, 1:695; session of November 7, 1822., reported in the Indicador, nos. 189 and 190, November 9 and 10, 1822, 893-898, cited in ibid., 1:685.

84. The writer also noted, "The French Minister has in vain interested himself for his unfortunate Compatriot" ( The Morning Herald, London, no. 13. 123, September 3, 1822, cited in ibid., 666-667 n. 19).

85. Hernández, debates of the Landaburian Society, session of January 6, 1823, in El Indicador, no. 251, January 10, 1823, 1053.

86. AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 2,897, petition to the queen from Antonio Hernández Blancas, August 21, 1836; AHN, Hacienda, leg. 532. The last mention I have found of Hernández's presence at the Economic Society is on February 8, 1823 (ARSEM, Actas, February 8, 1823). He died on January 10, 1826 (AHN, Hacienda, leg. 532).

87. ARSEM, leg. 248, Villanova's application for admission to the society, March 29, 1817.

88. ARSEM, leg. 284, Expediente sobre presupuesto y entrega de los establecimientos de instrucción pública, Mareh 12, 1822.

89. José Rafael Fadrique Silva Palafox became the twelfth duke of Híjar in 1818. The tenth duke, Agustín Pedro, had become director of the Economic Society in 1813 and had served in that capacity with great distinction until his death in 1817, presiding over one of the society's most fruitful periods and authoring, along with seven others, the Plan de educación del duque de Híjar, which proposed that a modified version of the method used to teach deaf students be employed with hearing children as well—echoing a suggestion made years earlier by Alea ( Plan de educación, ch. 1, cited in Ruiz Berrio 1970, 124-125).

90. The crown supplemented payments from the bishoprics of Cadiz and Sigüenza with funds from seven additional pensions, paid from a variety of sourees: arbitrios piadosos (charity tax), the newspaper El Diario de Madrid, the mail service, and so on (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 6,247, letter of July 4, 1840, from Eusebio María del Valle and Juan Antonio Seoane to the Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de la Gobernación de la Península).

91. AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 2,897, notification of July 21, 1826, from the duke of Infantado to the rector of the Royal School for Deaf-Mutes. The appointment was made by a royal order of July 21, 1826 (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 2,897).

92. His attendance is recorded in the school's ledgers for 1815, 1816, and 1817, and a note from his father's star pupil, Manuel Echevarría, also testifies to young Hernández's presence in the classroom during this time (ARSEM, leg. 231, 238, 245; leg. 324, doc. 5, note of February 22, 1816, from Manuel Echevarría to Hernández).

93. Roch-Ambroise Bébian (1789-1839) was born in Guadeloupe and sent to Paris at the age of eleven to study with the abbé Sicard. He rosa through the ranks at the Paris institute to become head of studies, and eventually started his own school. Bébian is remembered for his successful efforts to establish French Sign Language (rather than Methodical French) as the medium of instruction. Laurent Clere, the celebrated deaf Frenchman who together with Thomas Gallaudet founded the first school for deaf people in the United States, called him the "greatest hearing friend the deaf ever had" (Clere cited in Lane 1984, 10).

94. AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 2,897, October 5, 1835.

95. The account that follows is based on Hernández Blancas's petition to the governing board requesting that he be reinstated as head teacher (ibid., August 7, 1835), unless otherwise specified.

96. Reglamento of 1827, art. 14, reproduced in Granell y Foreadell 1932, 135.

97. Plan y Reglamento de Escuelas de Primeras Letras del Reino Aprobado por S.M. en 16-II-1825 (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1825), art. 88, cited in Ruiz Berrio 1970, 62. This was the opinion of a good many teachers in Spain at that time, according to Ruiz Berrio, who considers it a reaction against certain interpretations of Rousseau (Ruiz Berrio 1970, 62-63). The Reglamento of 1827 prohibited the head teacher from treating the students "roughly." It also stated that no employee could ever "lay hands on any deaf-mute," stipulating that should such a thing occur, it should be reported to the principal, who was responsible for "any disorder at the school, both among the students, teachers, and assistants, and among all the other employees." And while ir fell to the principal, together with the director, to deal with any disorder that might arise, nothing was said about what measures might be taken (Reglamento of 1827, art. 27, 36, 80, reproduced in Granell y Foreadell 1932, 136, 137, 140). the Reglamento of 1818 had been much more enlightened with respect to corporal punishment, prohibiting ir outright: "The children may not be punished with floggings, canings, of any other means that inflict physical pain," ir stated (Reglamento of 1818, art. 39, reproduced in Granell v Foreadell 1932, 96).

98. Hernández Blancas's petition (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 2,897, August 7, 1835).

99. ARSEM, Actas, June 20, 1835.

100. Hernández Blancas was officially informed of his suspension and prohibited from entering the school in a letter from the governing board of July 22, 1835 (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 2,897). The queen's approval of his termination was recorded in the society's minutes on October 24, 1835 (ARSEM, Actas, October 24, 1835).

101. ARSEM, Actas, August 8, 1835. Before the year was out, a total of seven would be expelled (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 6,247, letter of July 4, 1840, from Eusebio María del Valle and Juan Antonio Scoane).

102. ARSEM, leg. 352-1. Villanova was by then in his seventies and in poor health, and he was no longer collecting bis benefice from the arehepiscopal chureh of Saragossa (he had ceased to receive it years earlier, upon being named principal of the Royal School). When his position as spiritual director was abolished, he was left entirely without resourees and thus solicited a pension from the crown, with the society's support (ARSEM, leg. 352-1). I do not know whether this petition was granted. Granell records that on January 17, 1836, board members responded favorably to the governor's inquiry concerning Villanova's request for an annual pension of 12,000 reales (Granell v Foreadell 1932, 171 ). Granell also records (without further elaboration) that on August 5, 1836, the society agreed to pay Villanova 4,000 reales, 500 reales to be paid at once, then 300 reales each month, "until the debt is paid off" (172).

103. AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 2,897, petition of Antonio Hernández Blancas, September 5, 1858; the reply of October 20, 1858.

104. In November 1836 Prádez was listed as writing teacher and Fernández Villabrille as art teacher (ARSEM, leg. 294.1, Relaciones para la Guía de forasteros de 1837, November 24, 1836). Villabrille had been admitted to the Royal School asa student observer the previous year (Granell y Foreadell 1932, 160).

105. In August of that year employees were required to swear allegiance to the constitution of 1812, by order of Queen María Cristina, and Prádez was among them (Granell y Foreadell 1932, 173 ). In November Prádez's name also appeared in the school records (ARSEM, leg. 294.1, Relacioncs para la Guía de forasteros de 1837, November 24, 1836), but one month later he was not included on a list of the school's employees (Granell y Foreadell 1932, 174).

106. In 1815, when the war of independence had ended and he had begun to receive a regular salary once again—now raised to nine reales per day—Prádez had requested the board of directors' approval to marry. The board consented and decided to extend a personal invitation to the judge of the ecclesiastical tribunal of spolium (Granell y Foreadell 1932, 80). I have been unable to locate Prádez's marriage certificate or to ascertain if he indeed married in 1815, however.

107. Arehivo parroquial de Santiago y San Juan Bautista, diócesis de Madrid, Alcalá, Libro de defunciones, libro 12, fol. 101. The death certificate makes no mention of surviving children, suggesting that Prádez had none.

108. Ruiz berrio conjectures that ir Prádez was indeed a liberal, this may be the real reason why years earlier Fernando Selma, bis engraving teacher at the Academy of San Fernando, had turned against him, for the master engraver may not have wished to risk association with one of such dangerous political persuasion (Ruiz Berrio, personal communication).

109. The statue of Ponce, which was created by the deaf sculptor M. Iglesias Recio, represents the monk teaching the first letter of the manual alphabet to one of the de Velasco brothers and is reminiscent of Gallaudet University's well-known statue of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet teaching the manual letter A to his pupil Alice Cogswell. The dedication proclaiming Ponce to be the "inventor of the puro oral method for teaching deaf-mutes to speak, read, write and count" is dated June 6, 1920—a time when oralism held sway in Spain. The claim that Ponce invented the "pure oral method" underscores the historical revisionism of the day since, as we have seen in chapter 1, Poncc advocated the use of signs in teaching.

The class named for Bonet was founded by Félix-Jesús Pinedo Peydró, former president of the Spain's National Confederation of the Deaf.

110. The man in question, Daniel Perea, had been a student at the Madrid school and in 1856 he became a teaching assistant (CNSC I859, 30), although he served in this latter capacity only briefiy (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 3,766). By the time he was hired as art teacher in 1886, hall a century after Prádez's death, he was a well-known artist spccializing in bullfight scenes; his appointment had been supported by colleagues in Madrid's Cirele of Fine Arts, of which he was a member (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 3,766, petition of January 2, 1886, from members of the Cirele of Fine Arts of Madrid to the Ministry of Development). Perea taught at the school for nearly a quarter of a century, until his death in 1909.

1. "Since to speak is the same as to imitate what has been heard, it follows that he who cannot hear will not be able to speak," reasoned Bonet ([1620] 1930, 109).

2. Lasso [1550] 1919, 93, 94.

3. Hernández 1814, 21.

4. The same institution that in Franco played a key role in providing educational and social services for deaf people appeared curiously unmoved by the plight of its deaf flock in Spain. True, an occasional man of the cloth had concerned himself with deaf education—the Benedictines Pedro Ponce and Jerónimo Feijóo, the ex-Jesuits Juan Andrés Morell and Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, the Piarist father Fernández Navarrete, the abate Alea, the presbyter Vicente Villanova, and so on—but as an institution the Spanish Chureh thunded no deaf schools and taught no deaf children.

5. Constitution of Cadiz, art. 366, título IX, cited in Ruiz berrio 1970, 55.

6. This was the Plan y reglamento de escuelas de primeras letras del reino, passed by royal decree in February 1825.

7. José Manuel Ballesteros y Santa María (1794-1869), often in collaboration with Francisco Fernández Villabrille, authored numerous works on the deaf and the blind, including texts for their instruction. Ballesteros was a member of various scientific, medical, and literary academics, and a Knight of the Real Orden Americana de Isabel la Católica. To judge from his second surname, which he apparently never used, he was, like Pereira, and probably Vidal as well, of Jewish ancestry.

8. Villabrille described Ballesteros's name sign and translated it as "Mr. Pulse" (F. Fernández Villabrille 1851a, 143), but according to the dictionary of Spanish Sign Language compiled by Villabrille himself the sign so made meant "doctor" (F. Fernández Villabrille 1851b, 99). Ballesteros received a medical degree from the Colegio de San Carlos in Madrid in 1826 and first entered the Royal School asa student observer in 1821; the following year he was made a teaching assistant, and by 1828 he had risen to a position second in rank only to the head teacher himself.

9. Earlier attempts had been made: the Reglamento general de instrucción pública, passed by the Spanish parliament in 1821, can be considered Spain's first general law of education; it served as the basis for successive educational legislation during the remainder of the century. This document, which stated that teaching should be public, uniform, and free, was a virtual copy of the Dictamen y Proyecto de Decreto sobre el arreglo general de la enseñanza pública, presented to parliament by a committee on public instruction in 1814; the latter document was in turn inspired by the 1813 Informe de la Junta creada por la Regencia para proponer los medios de proceder al arreglo dc los diversos ramos de instrucción pública. Legislation from these years was not put into effect, however, for ir was annulled in 1814 with the return to absolutist rule. The Liberal Triennium produced the Proyecto de Reglamento general de primera enseñanza que se ha de observar en todas las escuelas de primeras letras de la Monarquía Española, but the absolutists' return to power once again prevented implementation of legislation from this period. In 1825 a royal decree promulgated the Plan y reglamento de escuelas de primeras letras del reino, Spain's second national law concerning education, which regulated the development and functioning of all Spanish schools. In its general characteristics it was similar to the Proyecto of 1822, despite the respective authors' political differences. Although the plan of 1825 was approved during the reign of Ferdinand VII, it did not actually take effect until after his death in 1833.

10. Reglamento, 1838, art. 25, reproduced in Granell v Foreadell 1932, 181; the entire document, 179-182.

11. Ley de Instrucción Pública de 1857, art. 108. The text of the law appeared in the Gaceta de Madrid, no. 1.710, on September 10, 1857. The Moyano Law made public primary instruction obligatory for all Spaniards.

12. The sign language found in and around Bareelona apparently represents an exception to this generalization, for it is largely unintelligible to signers from other areas, most likely because the deaf school there opened early in the nineteenth century and had only sporadic contact with the Madrid institute. Deaf people from Bareelona and its environs could attend an establishment in their own region staffed by teachers who were trained there; hence, a distinct sign language developed more or less in isolation from the variety that evolved in Madrid and was carried from there to other parts of the nation. According to Pinedo Peydró, "The sign language used in Madrid is considerably different from that of Bareelona. In Bilbao, Valencia, Seville, etc., there are also different gestures but not in such great quantity" (Pinedo Peydró 1981b, 56). Elsewhere in the same work the author remarks, "Catalan sign language is very different from the language most general to the rest of Spain and it is, consequently, almost unintelligible for all [other signers]" (166). In a more recent discussion of regional variation in Spanish Sign Language, Pinedo again affirms that "the difference is greatest between the [sign language] used in Catalonia and the rest of Spain'' (Pinedo Peydró 1989b, 64).

13. ARSEM, leg. 294.1, Relaciones para la Guía de forasteros de 1837 (dated November 24, 1836); Granell y Foreadell 1932, 171; Pinagua 1857, 47; Granell y Foreadell 1932, 306. This last reference lists, for the year 1857, seven classroom teachers, four instructors of vocational arts, and one teacher of sewing and needlework for the deaf girls.

14. The board of directors proposcd Jacoba Hernández's appointment in September 1835 (ARSEM, Actas, September 5, 1835). Her career at the school must have been short-lived, for the last reference to her of which I am aware appeared in the Guía de forasteros en Madrid for the year 1838, when she was listed as "professor of female day-students" ( Guía 1838). María del Carmen Gutiérrez taught for nearly a quarter of a century, from 1842 to 1868, and her pupils included both deaf and blind girls (M. Fernández Villabrille 1873, 121).

15. Goods produced in the shops were destincd almost exclusively for the school's internal consumption, and uniforms, shoes, and the like were manufactured on the premises. The print shop, however, produced works of professional quality and soon became the establishment's main souree of revenue.

16. Ballesteros did allow that deaf people might be employed as teaching assistants, subordinate to "professors of unhindered senses," and he also conceded that they might teach writing and drawing, which he considered "up to a certain point ... purely mechanical" (Ballesteros and Fernández Villabrille 1845, 107-108). Nevertheless, as has been mentioned in chapter 6, shortly after Ballesteros was named subdirector, a hearing man, Francisco Fernández Villabrille, replaced Prádez as art teacher. In 1856 Ballesteros journeyed abroad to visit foreign institutions for deaf students. The experience seemed to make him reconsider his position:

One thing that has greatly attracted my attention upon making the rounds of foreign schools for deaf mutes has been to see their instruction ... entrusted to the most outstanding among their brothers in misfortune. The example of Berthier, Forestier, Richardin, Lenoir, Alibert, Pelissier, and many others, does not let us doubt the possibility of this fact, which was only believed feasible in the teaching of the blind, of which there

are examples at the Madrid school, as also in the teaching of writing and drawing, entrusted previously to a deaf-mute [i.e., Roberto Prádez]. In the workshops today there are already deaf-mute teachers and even in the academic classes I have decidcd to employ a deaf-mute in the position of teaching assistant along side the [hearing] professors, that they may use them to the extent they believe necessary and according to the students' disposition (Ballesteros 1856, 81-82).

In that same year of 1856 two deaf people were indeed hired as teaching assistants: Daniel Perea, a former pupil, was hired to work with the boys' section, and Juana Juan with the girls' ( Academia de profesores ... 1859, 30). Granell, in an apparent reference to the latter appointment, lists a deaf "Joaquina Juan" among the school's personnel up through the following year (1857) (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 298, 306). Perea's stint as a teaching assistant only two years and eight months (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 3,766), although in 1886 he was hired as art teacher (see chapter 6, note 110).

17. The debt to the French pedagogues is openly acknowledged in Ballesteros and Fernández Villabrille 1845, 15, 16 n. 1, and 122-123.

18. Cabello y Madurga, no doubt for patriotic motives, asserted that Hernández "adopted Bonet's method, the only one used since that time" (Cabello y Madurga 1875b, 11). More recently, Negrín Fajardo echoed the claim, stating that from Hernández's time on, Bonet's method was the only one employed in Spain during the last century (Negrín Fajardo 1982, 31 n. 92). nevertheless, an abundance of materials (archival as well as published) suggests that throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, despite the Royal School's halfhearted efforts at teaching articulation, Granell's characterization of the manual method as "universal and exclusive" at that establishment is closer to the truth (Granell y Foreadell 1906a, 7). The oral method was adopted at the deaf school in Valencia in 1896 (NSC 1897, 4), but minutes from the Madrid school reveal that as late as 1927, oralism had not been implemented there (ACPEES, Actas del Colegio de Sordomudos, 1925-1929, June 9, 1927).

19. In 1835, however, the Royal School's former star student, Juan Machado, was turned down in his bid for a position in the establishment's printshop, as had been discusscd in chapter 6 (Granell y Forcadell c 1932, 158). In this same year ir was recorded that "because of a shortage of professors, the board agreed to admit two deaf-mutes as observers" (160), but as far as I can tell, neither one went on to become a teacher at the school, of even a teaching assistant.

20. In 1851 there were six deaf workers in the printshop, all of them students ("Crónica" 1851, 318). In 1861 deaf people, including four "advanced students," were teaching bookbinding, tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, and lithography (Granell y Forcadell 1932, 322).

21. AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 6,243, report of Francisco Escudero y Azara, July 22, 1863. In 68 Ballesteros's successor articulated the policy most clearly: "In the workshops only deat-mutes and the blind should be admitted as apprentices and assistants, since they are destined for them, but for reasons that aro easy to comprehend, the teacher in charge will not belong to either of these two classes of misfortune" (AGACE, Educación y Ciencia, leg. 3,593, Nebreda y López, Memoria, 1868 [ms], n.p.).

22. Lane 1992, 113. For discussion of the vigorous deaf movement that began at the Paris institute in the later 1820s with the ascent of deaf people to the rank of professor, see Karacostas 1993.

23. Marchesi 1987, 295-296.

1. I have been unable to obtain statistics on how many deaf teachers of deaf children there are in Spain today. What follows are the words of Lourdes Gómez Monterde, former technical adviser to the Center for Development of Curriculum at the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture and now a teacher at the Centro Público de Educación Especial de Sordos:

Regarding the present situation of deaf teachers of the deaf in Spain ... I would venture to say that we are in the "first credentialed generation." ... There have been, and there are, in our country, various deaf teachers of the deaf who taught and are teaching without credentials. they are persons, in the majority deafened after learning to speak, for whom, "since they communicate better with the deaf," room has been made in some deaf schools.... [She mentions six deaf teachers who lost their hearing arder lcarning to speak, and two art teachers deaf from birth, adding:] there may be a few others, since in deaf schools ir is not uncommon to employ some of the best former students for sporadic teaching activities (religious instruction, for example), or on a permanent basis (to teach drawing, physical education, workshops...).

But the situation is changing, she observes, as more deaf teachers prepare to obtain teaching credentials. Gómez Monterde herself received her credential in 1983; she knows of five other credentialed deaf teachers who are now teaching deaf students in elementary school and three in secondary school, as well as a few more who are studying for their degrees. Until a decade ago, Spanish teachers could have no "physical defects," but at present there are no legal barriers to deaf people entering the teaching profession. Requirements for candidates for a teaching position include an oral examination, which could be an obstaele, but deaf people are allowed to use a sign language interpreter. To date, however, no one has done so (Lourdes Gómez Monterde, personal communications, September 1, 1993, and June 25, 1996).

On an experimental basis, Spanish schools have begun to employ deaf advisers fiuent in Spanish Sign Language who share their knowledge and experience as deaf adults with students, teachers, and parents. The first two were hired in 1994, and a third was hired two years later (Gómez Monterde, personal communication, September 2 and 22, 1996).

2. Figures provided by a speaker from the Unión General de Trabajadores at the second Symposium Sobre el Sord, la Comunitat i el Llenguatge de Signes, Barcelona, September 9-12, 1992, sponsored by the Centre Recreatiu Cultural de Sords.

3. Asensio and Carretero 1989, 65.

4. Figures provided by a speaker from the Unión General de Trabajadores at the II Symposium Sobre el Sord, La Comunitat i el Llenguatge de Signes, Barcelona, September 9-12, 1992, sponsored by the Centre Recreatiu Cultural de Sords. the number of deaf people in Spain today is unknown (see note 22 of the introduction).

5. E.g., see conclusion, note 18. In the United States, almost all residential schools continued to use sign language for some subjccts (including vocational training and classcs for "oral failures") throughout the twentieth century—as pointed out to me by John Van Cleve (personal communication).

6. Pinedo Peydró 1989b, 31. The same author goes on to explain that "during many hours of class sign language was prohibited, depending on the mood of tactics of the professor, and in these cases, if a child was caught signing, he received blows to the hands that ... were very painful.... In general during class the students used signs more of less secretly to communicate among themselves. when the class ended, during recess, of after class ... everyone used sign language with the relief of one who can take off a gag he had been obliged to wear all day" (Pinedo Peydró 1989b, 31).

7. Suriá 1982, 40-41.

8. Constitución española, ch. 3, art. 49; ley 13, 1982, de 7 de abril, de Integración social de los minusválidos, título VI, sección tercera, art. 23.1. Article 23.2 states that special education shall be provided to disabled people who cannot be integrated into the ordinary school system, and article 26 stipulates that only when the nature of the disability makes ir absolutely necesary shall instruction be imparted in special schools. See also real decreto 334/1985, de Ordenación de la educación special.

9. As is frequently pointed out, deaf children may be the only ones who acquire their language and cultural traditions not from parents and other family members but rather from their peers at school.

10. Thus, Pinedo Peydró (1989b, 247) explains that for the hearing parents of a deaf child, "when they say integration they are manifesting their desire for their child to speak and understand as if he were hearing, for him to live among [the hearing], and to be unacquainted with manual language if possible, and to avoid contact with other deaf people."

11. Marchesi 1987, 301. Within the Ministry of Education and Culture (formerly Education and Science), Marchesi served first as director general of pedagogical reform, then as secretary of state for education.

12. Ibid., 304.

13. Marchesi remarks, "The possibility of incorporating sign language [into the instruction of deaf children attending hearing schools] is one of the conditions of guarantees for its satisfactory functioning." Nevertheless, he also states that "this does not mean this language should necessarily be used with the deaf child" (ibid., 296, 234).

14. Ibid., 308-309.

15. Other criteria for success are for the deaf child to "interact with his hearing schoolmates" and to "progress in his social adaptation" (ibid., 309).

16. Ciges 1982, 10; Angel Calafell i Pijoan, quoted in Pinedo Peydró 1981b, 122.

17. For details, see "La manifestación" 1984 and references therein.

18. In Madrid accounts appeared initially only in Ya and El Alcázar, although some other newspapers eventually carried reports as well, e.g., ABC, October 17, 1984, and Ya, December 4, 1984. An article announcing the demonstration appeared in the Voz de Aviles of September 28, 1984. For a summary of press accounts, see "La manifestación" 1984.

19. Perelló and Frígola 1987; Pinedo Peydró 1981a, 1989a; Rodríguez González 1992.

20. Deaf and hearing people often differ on the particulars, however. Many hearing educators advocate signed Spanish, in which manual signs merely complement the spoken word and the syntax is that of the oral language. But most deaf people express a preference for Spanish Sign Language, whose grammar is different from that of the national tongue (Marchesi 1987, 294). María Pilar Fernández Viader (1995) proposes bilingual education in Spanish Sign Language and written and spoken Spanish.

21. For discussion of the commission to study recognition of sign language as an official tongue, see F. del S. 1992. For the text of the proposition passed in June 1994, see "Proposició no de llei sobre la promoció ... del llenguatge de signes" 1994. Although this proposition does not have the status of a law, its passage signifies official recognition of sign language.

22. Gómez Monterde, personal communication, October 25, 1993.

23. "Cuando el silencio habla" 1994, 1. El País estimated that there were 3,500 participants, while El Faro del silencio, the magazine of Spain's National Confederation of the Deaf, put the number at more than 5,000 ("Reportaje" 1994, 9).

24. In a survey of teachers of deaf children, 70 percent of the respondents thought that teachers of profoundly deaf students should be familiar with Spanish Sign Language, while 81 percent said they should be familiar with signed Spanish, and 34 percent favored exclusive utilization of the spoken word for teaching. A survey of presidents of Spanish deaf associations revealed that 90 percent think teachers of profoundly deaf children should be familiar with Spanish Sign Language, 74 percent say they should be familiar with signed Spanish, and a mere 10 percent support the exclusive use of the spoken word for teaching. When asked whether deaf children should have some deaf teachers, 79 percent of the presidents of Spanish deaf associations thought this would be desirable, but only 40 percent of the teachers of deaf students, nearly all of them hearing, agreed (Marchesi 1987, tables 12.2-3, 292, 293, 295-296). Catalonia has recently agreed to provide captioned television for deaf people, but the rest of Spain has yet to follow suit.