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Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Elizabeth B. Bearden
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Abstract

Disability studies scholars and Renaissance scholars have much to learn from early modern schemata of disability. Early modern people used nature and the natural to discriminate against and to include people with atypical bodies and minds. In his writings, the English physician John Bulwer (1606–56) considers Deafness a natural human variation with definite advantages, anticipating current concepts of biolinguistic diversity and Deaf-gain, while acknowledging his society's biases. He refutes the exclusion of sign language and other forms of what he calls “ocular audition” from natural law, which made capacity for speech the benchmark for natural rights. Instead of using Deaf people as exceptions that prove the rule of nature or as limit cases for humanity, Bulwer makes deafness part of a plastic understanding of the senses, and he promotes the sociability of signed languages as a conduit to a universal language that might be encouraged and taught in England.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 33 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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