ABSTRACT
In 1684, Increase Mather recorded a “strange Relation of a Woman … that has been Dumb and Deaf ever since she was three years old”, noting her conversion as a “remarkable providence”.1 Mather’s account is symptomatic of a developing fascination with deafness and signed communication in seventeenth-century English writing. Nowhere, our assumptions tell us, is the estrangement of the word and the self more literally true than in the case of deafness, but early modern writers understood deafness as the point at which the word and the self could be, strangely, re-united. Exotic stories of respected signing deaf people in the Ottoman court, accounts of deaf noblemen taught to speak in Spain, and the numerous English stories and texts theorising about deaf people underline a shift in assumptions in the period. Jonathan Rée goes so far as to call this “one of the greatest scientific advances of the entire seventeenth-century”.2 By the end of the century, the estrangement of the deaf subject from the word, the world and its Creator was no longer seen as hopeless. Whether it had ever been in fact hopeless is another question, but the shift in perception is significant. While accounts of deaf people speaking were more sensational, it is from accounts of deaf people signing that we gain a greater insight into the place of deafness in developing notions of the word, the self and their complex relations in the early modern period.
