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.