The Spanish origins of deaf education: Ponce de Leon, Bonet and a disputed authorship
The first printed book on teaching deaf people to speak came out of Madrid in 1620, written by the secretary of the Constable of Castile. It was not the first method: a Benedictine at Ona had taught deaf pupils Spanish, Latin and Greek two generations earlier, and by the eighteenth century reference works were flatly asserting that the monk, not the secretary, was the true author of the book. This object sets out what the printed record supports, what it only reports, and who was left out of it.
Why this wins its question: The usual page on this subject picks a winner - either Ponce de Leon invented deaf education or Bonet published the first book - and cites nobody. Both statements are reports, and this object shows what each rests on: the 1620 imprint transcribed from a bibliographer's entry, the eighteenth-century Gelehrten-Lexicon assertion that Ponce is the true author named as an assertion, the 1838 report of the Ona manuscript given with its date and its reporter, the chapel-foundation deed cited by Feijoo as the one financial trace of Ponce's teaching, and the method itself - leather tongue, mirror, drawn heads - described from a working textbook of the Madrid national college. It also puts on record what the celebration usually omits: the pupil was a grandee's brother, and the tradition's own director, in 1870, judged half its apparatus useless.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book exists and its imprint is on record. The Guyot brothers' 1842 catalogue of everything published on the deaf gives the entry as: Bonet (Juan Pablo), "Reduccion de las letras y arte para ensenar a hablar a los mudos", the author styled servant of His Majesty, attached to the person of the Captain General of the Artillery of Spain and Secretary of the Constable of Castile, dedicated to Philip III, "En Madrid por Francisco Marco de Angulo 1620, 4o", with about eight figures and one plate.
The method was not Bonet's invention, and the nineteenth-century Spanish profession said so in its own textbooks. Carlos Nebreda y Lopez, director of the Colegio Nacional de Sordo-Mudos y de Ciegos in Madrid, wrote in 1870 that the discovery is owed to the genius of Ponce de Leon, "siendo este el primero que conociendo sus grandes ventajas instruyo a algunos de sus discipulos en el habla, no solo del idioma espanol, sino tambien del latin y griego", with truly notable results; and that Bonet, "sucesor de Ponce en la ensenanza", wrote the first book of which there is any notice on the subject, one "indudablemente escrita con presencia de los trabajos de Ponce", which became the point of departure and the base of everything done afterwards in this branch.
The attribution was not merely a suspicion; it was printed as an assertion. Guyot's catalogue, under the head Ponce, refers the reader to Nicolas Antonio's Bibliotheca Hispana and then to Joecher's Gelehrten-Lexicon, "ou l'on trouve affirme que Ponce est le veritable auteur du livre de Bonet" - where one finds it affirmed that Ponce is the true author of Bonet's book. The corpus carries this as a reported claim of the eighteenth-century reference literature, not as an established fact: no manuscript of Ponce was opened for this object, and the 1620 printing itself was not opened either.
There is a documentary trace for Ponce's teaching that is independent of the authorship quarrel, and it is financial. Nebreda records that Feijoo, in the Teatro critico, cites a deed founding a chapel granted in the villa of Ona by Ponce de Leon in which, setting out the resources he could count on for the foundation, Ponce states that one of them was what came to him from the teaching of several deaf-mutes whom he had shown how to speak. Ambrosio de Morales and Francisco Valles are named as writers who praised the work as marvellous and who were witnesses of it.
Ponce's own text was reported found in 1838 and the report is worth recording with its date, because the object's central question turns on a manuscript. Guyot prints an annotation by Ramon de la Sagra made at Groningen on 9 July 1838, during a visit to the deaf-mute institution there, that the original work of Pedro Ponce had just been found in the library of a convent in Spain, the monastery of San Salvador de Ona; Bartolome Gallardo had named it in his circular of 19 January 1838 listing very precious Spanish works, and Degerando was reported to hope for a copy. Guyot adds two incompatible accounts of where Ponce got the idea - de la Sagra says from the old pantomime dances, Hernandez says from the book of Bede.
The pupils were not the general deaf population, and the record says so in passing. Guyot notes that according to some authors Bonet's pupil was the younger brother of the same Constable of Castile whose secretary Bonet was - the sentence continues past the page opened here. What the printed title itself establishes is the setting: a book on teaching the deaf to speak written by a household officer of the artillery command and of a grandee's house, and dedicated to the king. Nothing in either source read here describes provision for deaf children outside such households in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
The technique is described concretely enough to be judged. Nebreda records that Bonet proposed the use of a leather tongue to show the distinct positions of that organ, and of a mirror so that they could be studied and copied by master and pupil; Tiburcio Hernandez recommended drawings or sections of the face for the different postures of mouth and tongue; and Hervas advised drawn heads delineating the configuration of the vocal organs in pronouncing letters and syllables.
The tradition continued in print for two and a half centuries, and it is a Spanish list. Nebreda names, after Bonet, Ramirez de Carrion, the abate Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro, Jacobo Rodriguez Pereira, Tiburcio Hernandez - master-director of the Colegio Nacional - and Francisco Fernandez Villabrille, first professor of that college, who died in 1864. Guyot's catalogue gives Hervas's own contribution its imprint: "Escuela Espanola de Sordo-mudos o arte para ensenarlos a escribir y hablar el idioma Espanol", Madrid 1795, two volumes in octavo, written at Rome, and dedicated to a descendant of the Ponce family.
The Spanish witness is a partisan one and prices himself. Nebreda writes of "Espana que tan marcada preferencia le ha dado siempre y que tan brillantes resultados ha obtenido en su practica", and he is the director of the state college whose history he is telling. The same pages, however, criticise his own tradition: the mirror as Bonet recommends it makes master and pupil lose much time; Hernandez's profile sections serve only in certain cases; all these aids could be applied with profit only to a teaching as individual in character as it then was; and the photographed faces the Colegio Nacional showed at the Aragonese exhibition of 1868 were confused, formed no system, and were an incomplete essay on drawings Hervas had proposed.
The tradition is an oralist one, and the manual alphabet sits inside it rather than beside it. Nebreda's own system of nineteen drawn faces gives each letter its capital and lower-case form in print and in manuscript characters "asi como su correspondencia con el alfabeto manual" - so the manual alphabet was still the working reference of the Spanish national college in 1870, while the stated goal of the teaching remained articulated speech. His opening pages describe the deaf pupil as unable to understand what is said to him except by the movement of his interlocutor's lips and call the pupils "estos infortunados seres", which is the period's own framing and not a neutral description.
The book travelled, slowly and in pieces. Guyot's note records that the principal chapters of Bonet had been translated into Dutch but remained in manuscript, that in 1838 Weiss of Munich was said to be occupied in making a German translation, and that some extracts translated into French are found in Degerando; the note also gives Bonet's death as about the year 1629. Guyot lists de l'Epee, Feith, Gall and Spurzheim, Hernandez, Hervas y Panduro and Nieuwenhuis among those who treat of Bonet's book and method, which is a measure of how the 1620 text reached the French and German schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.