Deafness, silence, and communication before modern education

A history of people without hearing

For centuries, Deaf people were misunderstood by hearing society. In early modern Europe, speech was often treated as proof of intelligence, reason, morality, and even humanity itself. Those who could not hear or speak were frequently excluded from education, religion, legal rights, and public life.

Yet Deaf people were never silent.  Long before formal Deaf schools existed, Deaf communities developed sophisticated ways of communicating through gesture, visual language, fingerspelling, facial expression, and shared sign systems. These systems varied across regions and communities, demonstrating that sign language evolved naturally rather than being artificially invented.

When speech meant power

In seventeenth-century Europe, philosophers and religious authorities often believed spoken language separated humans from animals. Because many hearing people assumed Deaf individuals could not acquire speech fully, deafness became wrongly associated with intellectual inferiority, social dependency, moral deficiency, and an inability to reason.

Some Deaf people were denied an education, inheritance rights, participation in church life, and legal independence.

This reveals how closely language and power were connected in early modern society.

Visual communication before universal sign language

Deaf people communicated through regional sign systems, home gestures, finger spelling, lip reading, writing and bodily expression.  There was no single universal sign language. Instead, visual communication evolved within families, schools, workshops, and Deaf communities.  Eighteenth-century Deaf individuals often experienced communication differently depending on geography and local community networks.

Isolation and community 

Many Deaf individuals experienced profound social isolation, particularly in rural communities where opportunities to meet other Deaf people were limited.  At the same time, Deaf communities formed wherever Deaf people gathered together - at markets, schools, churches, family networks.  These communities became spaces where visual language could survive and develop.

Rethinking “Silence”

Hearing society often described Deaf people as “mute” or “without language.”  Modern linguistic research has completely overturned these assumptions.  Sign languages are not simplified gestures or visual mime: they are complete languages with grammar, syntax, regional dialects, cultural history, and visual-spatial structure.  

The history of deafness is therefore not simply a history of disability.  It is a history of language, exclusion, survival, and resistance.

Can the body itself become language?

In seventeenth-century England, physician and writer John Bulwer (1606–1656) became one of the first English thinkers to argue that gesture could communicate meaning as effectively as speech.  At a time when spoken language was considered essential to education and intelligence, Bulwer suggested that the body itself could express thought, emotion, and knowledge.  His work challenged dominant beliefs about communication and laid important intellectual foundations for later understandings of sign language.

Chirolgia (1644)

Bulwer’s Chirologia examined hand gestures, bodily movement, rhetorical expression, and visual communication.  He believed gestures formed a structured system capable of conveying meaning across cultures.  Rather than treating gestures as primitive or secondary to speech, Bulwer argued they possessed their own communicative power.

“The Hand Speaks All Languages”

Bulwer described the hand as: “the instrument of instruments.”  He believed gestures could transcend spoken language barriers and communicate universally through visual expression.  This was a radical idea in an age when speech was often viewed as essential to reason itself.

In Philocophus, Bulwer (1648) explored Deaf communication more directly.  The text discussed lip reading, visual learning, Deaf education, and communication without speech.  Importantly, Bulwer recognised that Deaf individuals could reason, learn, communicate intellectually, and participate fully in society.  This directly challenged contemporary assumptions linking speech with intelligence. 

Bulwer did not invent sign language.  However, his work helped create intellectual space for recognising visual communication as legitimate language.  Bulwer’s work therefore forms a bridge between early modern rhetoric, gesture studies, Deaf communication, and modern linguistics.

Language, education, and resistance: the fight over how Deaf People should communicate

From the eighteenth century onward, Deaf education became one of the most contested areas of modern social history.  At the centre of these debates was a powerful question: should Deaf people communicate through sign language or be forced to speak?  The answer to this manualist-oralist debate shaped generations of Deaf lives.

Manualist schools taught through sign language, fingerspelling, visual instruction, and Deaf-led communication.  These schools often allowed Deaf students to communicate naturally and participate fully in education. 

In contrast, Oralist educators believed Deaf people should avoid sign language and learn to lip read and attempt to learn speech, arguing speech would help Deaf individuals integrate into hearing society.  In practice, many schools banned signing and punished students for using sign language, and prioritised speech drills over education.  This debate culminated in the Second International Congress on Education of the Deaf, held in Milan in 1880, which overwhelmingly endorsed oralism and condemned the use of sign language in schools.  The effects were global and dramatic: Deaf teachers lost employment, sign language was banned in classrooms, Deaf culture was systemically suppressed, and generations of Deaf students lost access to language.

Resistance and cultural survival

Many Deaf communities viewed Milan as a cultural and linguistic attack.  Despite institutional suppression, Deaf communities preserved sign language through clubs and associations, theatres, sports organisations, schools, friendship networks, and family communication.  Sign language survived because Deaf people protected and passed it across generations.

Deaf culture today

Today, Deaf culture is recognised as a vibrant linguistic and cultural community shaped by shared language, visual identity, activism, performance, art, literature, and political resistance.  Modern Deaf activism campaigns for interpreters, inclusive education, captioning, representation, recognition of sign languages, and accessibility.

Language rights are human rights

The history of Deaf people is not a story of silence.  It is a story of communication, exclusion, resistance, and cultural survival. Understanding Deaf history means recognising sign languages not as substitutes for speech - but as rich and sophisticated languages in their own right. 

Deaf communities resisted attempts to suppress sign language and fought for the right to define their own communication, culture, and identity.