John Bulwer (1606–1656) and Some British and French Contemporaries

Abstract

Summary John Bulwer’s (1606–1656) work was unknown in 17th–18th century France. In 1827, when Joseph-Marie Degérando (1772–1842) became curious about the relation between the methods respectively of Bulwer and John Wallis (1616–1703), the pioneer oral instructor of the deaf in Britain, he had to query Charles Orpen, M. D. (1791–1856) in Dublin because no copy of Bulwer’s Philocophus (1648) could be found in Paris. In fact, Theodore Haak (1605–1690) had sent a copy of this book from London to Père Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) in Paris in July 1648, but none of Mersenne’s circle could read English, and Mersenne died several weeks later. In that context, this paper presents a comparison of Bulwer’s views with those of the Cartesians and Port-Royalists. Wallis claimed he knew of no work on speech for the deaf prior to his own, but he must have known about the Philocophus from the time of its publication, five years before his De Loquela (1653) and nearly 14 years before he began teaching the deaf.