This chapter uses the examples of marriages by deaf people in this period to examine how ideas about deafness operated in practice. Records show that most prelingually deaf people were able to marry using signs, and that clergy generally accepted signed vows as evidence of intention and consent. Some of these cases, however, reveal points of vulnerability: signed communication could be misread, manipulated, or deliberately reinterpreted by those with an interest in challenging a marriage’s validity. The chapter also considers how wealthy families responded when a deaf person was an heir. Rather than inventing new legal mechanisms, families relied on the well-established device of the strict settlement to secure property, guide inheritance, and provide structured support for the deaf heir. Together, these practices show that while prejudice and misinterpretation persisted, deaf people were able to marry and inherit within familiar legal frameworks, revealing a more flexible and inclusive system than has often been assumed.

This chapter examines the central role of Christianity in shaping early modern understandings of deafness. It demonstrates that while the Church was responsible for promoting deaf inclusion, it was also a powerful source of enduring prejudice about deafness. Across England and Europe, clerics routinely enabled deaf people to marry, make confession, and receive the Eucharist using sign language. This acceptance of sign language as a legitimate alternative to speech had significant legal implications, enabling people to demonstrate their rational capacity. Ecclesiastical acceptance promoted the idea that deaf people were legally capable, able to consent, testify, and participate fully in early modern society. Yet the Church also generated some of the most damaging and long-lived ideas about deafness. The association of hearing with spiritual growth meant that deaf people continued to face prejudice throughout the period. The chapter argues that this tension between inclusion and suspicion defined the early modern religious experience of deaf people: it also suggests that encounters with deaf people changed contemporary perceptions about the sensory nature of salvation.

This chapter examines how the records of the poor law, including petitions to magistrates, reveal everyday attitudes towards deafness in early modern England. These records show that deafness was rarely treated as a disabling condition in itself; deaf men and women were generally expected to work, contribute to their households, and support themselves. When deaf people did seek relief, their petitions almost always combined deafness with another factor – old age or illness for example – indicating that deafness alone was not considered sufficient grounds for charitable support. Yet the material also shows how deafness increased vulnerability to life cycle poverty, heightening the risks of unemployment. The language of care, seen in these petitions and in private family trusts for deaf relatives, was sometimes protective but could also function as a mechanism of control, framing deaf petitioners as dependent or incapable. The chapter argues that tensions between expectation of independence and protective oversight shaped the lived experience of many deaf people within early modern systems of welfare or justice

This chapter explores how early modern understandings of deafness were shaped by the interaction of new anatomical knowledge with older medical theories. Advances in the study of the ear helped to establish deafness as a primarily physical condition rather than a marker of impaired intellect. The speechlessness of deaf people was seen as the consequence of deafness, rather than a cognitive disability. Humoural medicine influenced the interpretation of these discoveries, and suggested that all forms of deafness existed along a single continuum. This fluidity may have softened the legal implications traditionally attached to prelingual deafness. At the same time, because age-related deafness was the most common form of deafness, this was the lens through which most people imagined prelingual deafness. The chapter argues that this combination of medical theory and social experience profoundly influenced how deafness was conceptualised in early modern England.

This chapter examines the working lives of prelingually deaf people. It demonstrates that like their hearing contemporaries, deaf people’s patterns of employment were shaped primarily by their social standing, birth order and inherited wealth. At the same time, certain trades were repeatedly chosen for deaf children. Many were trained in visually oriented crafts, working as tailors or ropemakers, where skill depended on sight rather than speech. Others entered exceptionally loud trades – most notably blacksmithing – where vocal communication was impractical and with high rates of occupational deafness. These choices suggest both pragmatic adaptation and an awareness of the environments in which deaf apprentices could thrive. The chapter concludes by examining several wealthy deaf gentlemen who trained as artists, part of a wider European tradition of deaf artists. Together, these cases reveal that deaf people were not only expected to work, but that their occupations were both varied and socially contingent. The integration of deaf people into the works force may have meant that many people encountered a deaf sign language user during their lives.

This chapter offers a rare glimpse into the lives of deaf children in their own words, using letters and pedagogical exercises that record their experiences directly. These sources show that deaf children were expected to meet the social and behavioural demands of their class and status much like their hearing peers, even when such expectations conflicted with their deafness. They also reveal evidence of a signing community in London earlier than previously recognised, indicating sustained contact between deaf children and adults who used signed communication. The chapter traces a distinctly British tradition of deaf education, from the experiments of John Wallis and William Holder to the teaching methods of Henry Baker and, later, Thomas Braidwood. Across this period, the strong emphasis on vocal speech reflected wider cultural concerns with bodily discipline, eloquent expression and polite society. Within this framework, signing was cast as ‘savage’, while speech was a mark of civility – a distinction that shaped attitudes towards deaf people well into later centuries.

This chapter sets out the book’s central claim, namely that deafness offers a new perspective on early modern England. It does this by revealing both the diversity of deaf experiences and the cultural weight attached to speech and hearing. Drawing on extensive archival research, it recovers the lives of deaf and deafened people across the social spectrum, showing how prelingually deaf individuals using sign language to work, marry and participate in religious life. Their stories challenge long-standing assumptions that a primarily oral society excluded them. Instead, deaf people were more integrated than printed sources or legal guides suggest, even as prejudice about speech and rationality persisted. The chapter also introduces the methodological challenges of writing deaf history, foregrounding the rarity of first-person accounts and the importance of interpreters, family networks and teachers. By combining insights from medical, theological, legal and cultural models of disability, the chapter reframes deafness as a historically situated experience that illuminates broader questions of knowledge, communication and what it meant to be human in early modern England.

This chapter challenges the long-standing view that the orality of the law in early modern England meant that deaf people were denied a legal personhood because they could neither hear to understand nor speak to give their consent. While prejudice about deaf people’s intellectual capacity persisted, legal records show a growing acceptance of sign language as a legitimate alternative to vocal speech. Courts increasingly recognised that consent could be communicated through signs, allowing deaf individuals to make contracts, convey property, give evidence, and make binding decisions. The process was uneven: some magistrates questioned the credibility of deaf people or their signs, and procedures varied across jurisdictions. Yet by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, both civil and criminal cases demonstrate an acceptance that signed communication could establish understanding and rational capacity. Rather than excluding deaf people from legal personhood, the period reveals a gradual but significant expansion of their recognised agency, reshaping assumptions about speech, reason, and participation in the law.

This chapter concludes that deafness in early modern England encompassed a wide spectrum of experiences, and challenges long-held assumptions that prelingually deaf people were excluded or legally incapacitated. Archival records show that many deaf individuals married, inherited, worked and engaged fully with their communities, revealing far greater integration than contemporary texts imply. At the same time, powerful prejudices endured, shaped by theological ideas linking impairment to sin and by cultural beliefs that equated speech with reason. By combining legal, social, medical and theological perspectives, the conclusion argues for a more nuanced understanding of disability, one grounded in lived experience as well as representation.

This chapter explores how early modern philosophers used deafness to probe the nature of language, knowledge and human rationality. Contemporaries tested the idea that vocal speech was a marker of reason by teaching deaf people to speak vocally. This chapter focuses on the efforts of linguists, and philosophers to teach two young deaf men, Alexander Popham and Daniel Whalley, in seventeenth-century Oxford. This chapter examines how deaf signers inspired the parallel project of developing a universal or ‘philosophical’ language. Encounters with deaf individuals, including those observed by John Wallis, prompted some academics to change their mind about the eloquence of signed communication, and to reconsider whether speech was the only valid expression of rational thought. Deaf people thus became central to debates about how humans acquire knowledge, whether language shapes cognition, and what forms of expression could signify full participation in human society.

Describe how children can take different paths in development and reach similar destinations; understand the developmental differences between children as a set of strengths and challenges that are highly sensitive to environmental context; explore how events in children’s lives can trigger a cascade of later consequences.

American poets increasingly began to bring disability into their poetry in a more direct way in the 1980s and 1990s. Along with their embodied experiences living with disability, the work of many of these poets represents their involvement in the disability rights movement and disability culture and puts disability at the center of the poetry by writing primarily for disabled (rather than nondisabled) readers. I call the twenty-first-century poets who continue this tradition of disability culture poetry “crip poetry.” Examples discussed include Meg Day, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Amber DiPietra, Denise Leto, Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, Constance Merritt, and Molly McCully Brown. In contrast, I call the twenty-first-century poets who develop disability poetics that are not written primarily for disabled audiences, and that are often based in other aesthetic movements and/or identities, “disability poetry.” Examples discussed include Bettina Judd, Airea Matthews, David Wolach, and Brian Teare.