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

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth B. Bearden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Signed Languages ◽  
Universal Language

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.

“Civil in any Country, if They Are So in the Fashion of France”

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-158
Author(s):  
Céline Carayon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
New World ◽  
Gestural Communication ◽  
State Control ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Nonverbal Expression ◽  
Modern France

As the 1550 Royal Entry in Rouen described in the opening of this chapter reveals, Renaissance and Early Modern France was home to a deeply ceremonial culture in which political and social rituals held complex meanings. This chapter reviews significant historical and cultural developments that transformed Europeans’ predominantly oral cultures after 1500. At the time of their explorations in the Americas, the French were familiar with a variety of sign traditions that informed their perception of Indigenous gestures and prepared them well to communicate with signs in the New World. In France, gestural communication was deeply connected to the realms of religious and secular oratory, drama (theatre), and court protocols. The seventeenth century saw a renewal of scientific and philosophical interest for manual eloquence with new universal language schemes being developed, including some of the first manuals of sign language. Increased state control over definitions of civility and ongoing distrust of theatrical gestures as unauthentic resulted in diverging types of nonverbal expression among the elite and the rest of the population. The chapter ends with an overview of early Atlantic repertoires of signs that evolved from the traditions of mariners and soldiers who participated in early voyages.

METAPHYSICS AND MODERNITY: NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS IN GERSHOM CARMICHAEL AND FRANCIS HUTCHESON

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAMUEL GREGG
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Metaphysical Foundation

This paper argues that the founding fathers of the tradition of Scottish Enlightenment natural jurisprudence, Gersholm Carmichael (1672–1729) and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), articulated a view of rights that is pertinent to the contemporary dominance of the language of rights. Maintaining a metaphysical foundation for rights while drawing upon the early-modern Protestant natural law tradition, their conception of rights is more significantly indebted to the pre-modern scholastic natural law tradition than often realized. This is illustrated by exploring some of the background to their respective theories of rights, detailing the precise reasoning that Carmichael and Hutcheson brought to bear upon their conception of rights, and then exploring their application of their understanding of rights to the question of property.

scholarly journals Mundo da vida e Direito Natural. Uma Fundamentação Fenomenológica dos Direitos Humanos?

Phainomenon ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 22-23 (1) ◽  
pp. 441-454
Author(s):  
Ana Paula Loureiro de Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Modern Age

Abstract The justification of Natural Law is a very controversial issue, not only after the Positivist’s rebuttals, but since its very anthropological foundations in the early modern age. In this paper, I try do give an account of Natural Law and natural rights in terms of a phenomenological description of the background of normative intentionality. Taking a genetic stance, I go from the positive norm and the intentionality that constitutes it to the underling pregiveness that supplies the condition of its possibility. I exhibit it as the experience of the live-world, and I analyze it as an intersubjective world, where persons are given as equals and worth-counting. This is the very root of the concept of human dignity. Starting from it, I develop an account of the sense and content of the concept of Human Rights as a set of eidetic laws creating the framework for authentic human relationships.

Sign Language Contact

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Quinto-Pozos ◽  
Robert Adam
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Signed Languages

This chapter argues that language contact is the norm in Deaf communities, and that deaf people are typically multilingual. They use signed, written, and, in some cases, spoken languages for daily communication, which means that aspects of the spoken and/or written languages of the larger communities are in constant interaction with the signed languages. If one considers the contact that results from users of two different signed languages interacting, various comparisons can be made to contact that occurs across two or more spoken languages. The term unimodal contact, or that which comes about because of two languages within the same modality, can be used to characterize such contact. However, if one considers the contact that results from interaction between a signed and a spoken or written language, the term bimodal (or even multimodal) contact is more appropriate.

ASTROLOGY AND HUMAN VARIATION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK S. DAWSON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Forensic Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Relative Degree ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
The Face

ABSTRACTProcesses for the identification of criminal suspects tell us a great deal about wider cultural assumptions and social prejudices regarding somatic difference; its causes, relative degree, and consequence. If early modern Europeans had something approaching a forensic science, it was astrology, which has recently garnered renewed attention from historians of ideas. Rather than assume astrology's seventeenth-century decline in the face of revolutionary natural philosophy, what follows suggests that English astrology remained significant for mundane bodily discrimination, in the context of both a more deliberate, gradual reform and the tenacity of centuries-old humoral physiology. More importantly, scrutiny of astrological practice, and the logic underpinning its lasting currency, can reveal much about the significance of bodily contrasts and the meanings ascribed to them by Tudor-Stuart folk.

A Demonstrative Theory of Natural Law: Johannes Althusius and the Rise of Calvinist Jurisprudence

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Witte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Complex Theory ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Procedural Rights

Early modern Calvinists produced a rich tradition of natural law and natural rights thought that shaped the law and politics of protestant lands. The German-born Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius produced one of the most original Calvinist natural law theories at the turn of the seventeenth century. Althusius argued for the natural qualities of a number of basic legal norms and practices by demonstrating their near universal embrace by classical and biblical, catholic and protestant, theological and legal communities alike. On this foundation, he developed a complex theory of public, private, penal and procedural rights and duties for his day, to be embraced by everyone, particularly by those who were slaughtering each other in religious wars, persecutions and inquisitions. Althusius' theory of natural law and natural rights was Calvinist in inspiration but universal in aspiration, and it anticipated the political formulations of a number of later Western writers, including Locke, Rousseau and Madison.1

From Idiot Beast to Idiot Sublime: Mental Disability in John Cleland's Fanny Hill

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Christopher Gabbard
Keyword(s):  
Special Education ◽  
Cognitive Impairment ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Mental Disability ◽  
Species Boundaries ◽  
Fixed Condition ◽  
Locus Classicus ◽  
The Way

This essay investigates an erotic encounter between the libertine Louisa and Good-natured Dick, foregrounding the way Dick's representation challenges early modern notions of idiocy as a fixed condition and Enlightenment assumptions (articulated in John Locke's Essay) that rationality and linguistic capability underwrite human superiority. Employing disability studies as a frame, it explores how cognitive impairment can serve as a device for elucidating the text's thematic preoccupation with valorizing signs and sensation over language and reason. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's concept of “narrative prosthesis” comes into play as the piece interrogates the passage's sublime rhetoric and allusion to the theriophilic paradox. References to discourses concerning animal soul (René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi), sign language (Johann Conrad Amman), medical understandings of the nerves and sensation (Thomas Willis), and setting species boundaries (Julien de La Mettrie) illustrate that the episode is a locus classicus of anti-Lockean epistemology, one pointing forward to the abbé de Condillac and Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (originator of special education).

scholarly journals Prawo naturalne w ramach radykalnego oświecenia

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Michał Wendland
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century

The main difference between classical (both ancient and medieval) and modern concepts of natural law lies in the assumption of its supernatural (divine) foundation. Early modern philosophical concepts tend to undermine and gradually to deny God or some other metaphysical entity as the source of natural law. Some contemporary scholars (e.g. Habermas, Bobbio) define this process as transition (modernization, rationalization, Positivisierung) of traditional natural law towards the idea of natural rights and human rights. We can distinguish at least three main schools of natural law during the 17th and 18th centuries, each one more radical than the others: de Groot dares to consider the natural law “as if there were no God”. The philosophers of early Enlightenment (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire) were perhaps more daring, nevertheless they were all deists and the “Supreme Being” still validates natural law in their writings. The article aims to examine the most radical view on natural law, i.e. partly forgotten and underestimated ideas of French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet. For they were all thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (J. Israel), all of them were materialists and atheists, and they perceived the nature and natural law as completely separated from God or other supernatural being. Unlike their older colleagues, these radical philosophers demanded equality (for women and ethnical minorities as well), emancipation, and social justice for all classes. This papers describes the idea of natural law within the radical Enlightenment movement,and investigates some political consequences of this interpretation during the French Revolution. While strongly materialistic, progressive, and atheist, the ideas of Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet were also perceived as politically dangerous. All revolutionary attempts to put these ideas into political and social practice have failed. Finally, these ideas were refuted, but they returned during the 19th- and 20th-century debates on human rights.

scholarly journals In Search of ISL's Pre-History

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bosco Conama ◽  
Cormac Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Signed Languages ◽  
Signed Language ◽  
Straight Line ◽  
Gender And Age ◽  
On This Island ◽  
History Of

Irish Sign Language (ISL) became a recognised language in the State with the passing of the 2017 Irish Sign Language Act. It is a language that has been shown to not only be a fully-fledged language, but one that exhibits complexity and significant variation by gender and age. Research into the linguistics and sociolinguistics of ISL has been carried out over more than thirty years, and it is almost twenty years since the establishment of Trinity College's Centre for Deaf Studies, source of much of this research. But an examination of the historical records reveals an even greater complexity. Modern day ISL is descended, in the main, from the signed languages that were used in Cabra's Catholic Deaf schools from the 1840s, but little is written about other signed languages, and variations thereon, that have existed on this island over the last 200 years. This article attempts to show that the history of Irish signed language(s) used by Deaf people is neither the story of signing systems invented by hearing people, nor of a single genesis leading in a straight line to modern ISL - but a layered and diverse account of social, historical, educational, and language change.

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