Animals, Gesture, and Communication Despite it All

by KARL STEEL

It's the week before Kalamazoo, so of course I've just drafted my New Chaucer Society Paper.

Yeah. So, as I'm in Berlin, I'll simply wave fondly at Kalamazoo from a distance, and as I have more stuff to write during what remains of this chunk of my sabbatical -- one thing being a chapter on medieval animals and disability -- I need to get my stuff coherent, and fast! Last week was muteness (and thank you, hugely, everyone who helped me out on twitter and so on with ideas!); this week, it's gesture, which is as new to me as muteness was last week. And next week, well, I'll simply watch what trouble you all get into at the Big Show. And wish all the mentors and mentees a charming, helpful encounter!

And OH MY GOODNESS: as I was writing this, Jonathan Hsy was posting a BABEL events at Kzoo 2016 post. READ THAT. Use it. Mark your calendars. Do that. First.

For those of you who are grading, godspeed; for those of you who are writing your Kalamazoo papers, likewise; for those of you making long-distance moves for a new academic job, congratulations and good luck; and for those of you whom the market ignored, or disdained, for those of you not yet sure what you can do this Fall, all my best for you, and for a better future for the public good of education, one freed from the ugly strictures of Spreadsheet Rationality (read Eileen Joy here, and vote YES for a CUNY Strike Authorization, if you can, and if you haven't done so yet).

British Library Yates Thompson MS 26 44r (detail)

Read on if you like! Or just finish your grading.

Like Modern English, Middle English abounds in metaphors that troped impairment as animality: "blind as a beetle," "deaf as an adder," "mad as a goose." Mainstream medieval philosophy and Christian doctrine regularly glossed the paradigmatic quadrupedal animal body as a material form of irrationality, and likewise held that animals were "mute" not because animals were silent, but because the sound they made was understood as unwritable, as senseless, as mere noise.

Within a disability rights perspective, it certainly not unjustifiable to decry these comparisons, because they reduce impaired humans to a condition of animal degradation. Without - and I hope this understood - denying the importance of human rights, my scholarly habits of critical animal studies encourage me to linger with the animal comparison, to explore what might be done with it. My training means that I can't simply say that humans are better than animals, but neither do I want just to say that animals, of whatever sort, are all subjects of a life, and deserve to have their unique perspectives respected. What I'm doing in this paper is a bit more delicate, and, as befits someone who is new to disability studies, more tentative: I'm proposing that the metaphor of "natural" animal impairment offers up as model of multiple sensory and bodily norms, helping to dislodge the idealized, able-bodied human at least implicitly at the center of so many medieval narratives of human impairment.

In medieval narrative, at least if there's a saint involved, a person who is "blind as a beetle" will leave sighted. I offer the sample of the Patrologia Latina, where the nouns surdus and mutus often travel together, and likewise often travel with stories of miraculous healing. Augustine's Enchiridion promises that the bodies of the holy will be resurrected "sine ullo vitio, sine ulla deformitate," without any fault, without any deformity. However advantageous this may be for the impaired person, in this life or the next, the at least implicit message of these healing stories is that the impairment is an inconvenience, both for the impaired person and the saint. Healing someone's muteness allows the saint and the formally mute person to talk in the language the saint knows best; it allows the saint to replace an inconveniently impaired person with one whose body works the way the saint presumes it should. With this autonomy granted, the healed person goes one way, and the saint goes another. Normalcy has been restored.

This strong medieval narrative tendency towards the miraculous normalization of impairment is simply not as common in stories of saintly encounters with animals, no matter how miraculous. To be sure, these stories of mastery, taming, protection, elimination, and especially communication often require that a saint make himself understood to animals, and sometimes involve the reverse. Nonetheless, a saint who encounters an animal that is as "blind as a bat," because it is a bat, is probably not going to make that blind bat see.

One implication of this observation becomes more obvious if we concentrate on stories where that supposed impairment could have been overcome. These are stories about saints and birds, and, especially for my talk, in the story of Cuthbert's encounter with the penitential ravens.

I am interested in birds because they're an outlier in medieval negative glossings of animality. They're bipedal, for one, and so cannot be so easily classed as beasts confined to merely terrestrial appetites. The high-flying eagle, was commonly honored with tropological admiration for its supposed ability to look directly into the sun. And birds were the animals most typically imagined to have voiced language too. No hero that I know of gains the ability to understand the language of pigs or even dogs; but in the Volsung saga, Siegfried eavesdrops on birds, while the Middle English “Bird of Four Feathers,” or, still closer to home, the Parliament of Fowles, the House of Fame, and the Squire’s and Manciple’s Tales also all furnish ready examples. As birds have a peculiar capacity to erase the supposed impairment of being animal, a saintly encounter with a bird is one where it is very easy to imagine the bird ceasing, at least for a while, to be a "mute beast." 

Knowing that helps us recognize what makes the story of Cuthbert and the penitential ravens so special. The story goes like this: when the saint sees these birds tearing thatch from the roof of his guest house on the island of Farne, he waves them away, and verbally rebukes them. They flee, and then one or more ravens returns, and by way of apology, gives the saint a lump of pig’s lard. Written versions of the story first appear in a late seventh-century anonymous life, written not long after Cuthbert's death; Bede retells it several times in verse and prose; Aelfric gives it a compressed form, and then it appears in two late medieval, Middle English versions, one a couplet attached to choir stall paintings at Carlisle Cathedral, and the other at length in the Cuthbert compilation now known as Egerton 3309.

Of course, penitential fowl are a hagiographical motif of especial popularity with British saints. Saints Columbanus, Illtud, Wereburga, Guthlac, and, on the continent, Amelburga all have their problems with birds, often voracious geese, and often extract an apology from them. But barring the Cuthbert story, all these penitential birds are always only imitating something or someone else. Jonas of Bobbio’s life of Saint Columban has its bird "oblitus ferocitatis,” “forgetful of its wild nature,” splitting the bird’s miraculous behavior from its basic wildness. Illtud’s geese "withdraw…of their own free will..like tame animals," quasi domestica quadrupedia, a strange comparison. The posture of the geese of Amalburga - "submissive wings" with "heads laid on the ground" - is only a "simulacro" of reasonable human behavior. Wereburga’s geese act "acsi captiva pecora," as if they were captive livestock, or contrastingly, in the monk Henry Bradshaw’s 1513 Middle English Life of Werenburga, "as yf they had reason naturall." Words like quasi abound in other Latin accounts of Wereburga's miracle, while Felix describes Guthlac's birds with veluti and velut, for example, "as if conscious of its ill-doing," words that render the animal’s behavior only apparently more than instinctual.

No account of the story of Cuthbert and the penitential ravens that I know of loads its story with qualifications like this. In all of these, the birds are directly penitent, unscreened by metaphor. This is how the first, anonymous life describes them: "and settling above the furrow with outspread wings and drooping head, [they] began to croak loudly, with humble cries asking his pardon and indulgence. And the servant of Christ recognizing their penitence gave them pardon and permission to return." And here's how it looks 700 years later, in the long Middle English version:

Þe crawe spred hir wengys o brade,
And louted to him lawly þat tide
Reufully sho crobbed and cryed,
And schewed takyn expresse
Of praying of forgyfnes.
Cuthbert vndirstode hir dede
And leued hir to fle away gude spede.

Now, not every iota of Cuthbert hagiography tells the story: it's not in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, nor in Alcuin's Bishops, Kings, and Saints of York, the metrical Cuthbert calendar, or the twelfth-century Cuthbert writings of Symeon and Reginald of Durham. The story's illustrated several times, most famously in Yates Thompson 26, and while these illustrations really do look like birds, they're even slimmer peg to hang an interpretation on than the texts I've offered you. I'll simply say that the story's not quite told everywhere, but it's still common, and where it exists, it is remarkably consistent.

I acknowledge as well that exegetical ravens are thickly symbolic, and I acknowledge that medieval commentators often agree with Dominic Alexander in taking stories like this as a sign of a saintly return to prelapsarian mastery over the animal world. I likewise acknowledge that this unique feature of the Cuthbert lives may be due to the inertia of storytelling or a respect for the integrity of the text: Bede makes some small changes, but mostly he just bookends it with explanations, “look to the ant o sluggard,” and so on. But I'm still struck that the stories that precede it - in Columbanus and in Athanasius's story of Saint Anthony and the hungry donkeys, which Bede himself cites - do not do what the Cuthbert story does, nor do the many avian miracles that follow Cuthbert's. Surely this unusual feature merits some kind of commentary.

Most striking is how much like ravens these ravens are. Paul Cavill emphasized this in his early article on animals and Cuthbert, and so does Susan Crane's superb commentary on the story, which stresses both the encounter's pastoral quality, with its notable combination of hospitality and submission, and what she calls the birds' "own ravenly, ravenous obedience," which is not just "a divine puppet show." 

For that "ravenly, ravenous obedience" to happen, and to happen meaningfully, the story needs translation, between the saint and the birds. Again, there are a number of ways this could happen: Goscelin of St Bertin's Wereburga life has its geese plead their case "as if with a human voice." This page from Tom Peete Cross's Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature neatly demonstrates that if an animal's going to talk, it's probably going to be a bird. The Cuthbert raven encounter could easily enough have been resolved simply by having the birds apologize vocally. Instead, with "humiliata uoce," a humble or abased voice, they begin, in the Middle English, to "ruefully" "crob and cry," or, in the anonymous life, to "crocitare," to croak, a word whose very rarity in medieval Latin marks a real effort to rightly represent this avian communication.

And when the ravens bow and stretch their wings, Cuthbert recognizes what they mean. This communication is in the style of monks, which discouraged or even forbade speaking, and which required a set of bodily movements to communicate the essentials of being a monk, chiefly, obedience and submission to the community. By bowing, the birds are "speaking" in a language that is understandable both to Cuthbert and the monks who produced these stories and among whom they chiefly circulated. Bede says that the raven uses "such signs as it could," or, to put this another, way, such signs as could be understood by a human. They are accommodating the communicative needs of this human monk. And when they furnish him with a chunk of pig lard, which he uses to waterproof his shoes, they are doing what they can to help him thrive in an environment much better accommodated to their capacities than to his.

That formulation is perhaps bizarre and over-clever, yet I am framing it this way to stress that this story strikes me as being about meeting in the middle. By preserving difference, by not likening the ravens' behavior to anything else, by requiring that Cuthbert recognize what the birds are doing - he "vndirstode hir dede" in the Middle English - the story preserves enough difference for translation to be both necessary and possible. The story refuses to simply wave away the difference in capacities and lived bodily experiences of human saint and penitential birds. Without requiring assimilation, it imagines the possibility of the satisfaction of mutual dependencies.

Medieval narrative was willing to imagine communication between humans and nonhumans; and on occasion it imagines these nonhumans making themselves understood not by speaking, but by making gestures suitable to the profession of their audience: kneeling ravens with a monk, or, another example, the outstretched paws, a gesture of homage, from the lion to Yvain, a knight. When we recognize that medieval texts also often trope nonhumans as impaired, and that communication still happens, without that impairment being miraculously "cured," we can take these medieval narratives of interspecies communication as a model for thinking impairment as something other than a condition that must be overcome for the sake of monolithic normativity. For these encounters are stories of multiple nodes of normalization, multiple ways of life: what is good for a raven is not good for a saint, necessarily, and still they can meet, and make themselves understood as they are.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

Alcuin of York on Cuthbert, Latin.

Amelberga and the Geese, Acta Sanctorum, Julii III. Latin.

Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Saint Anthony. Translation.

Bradshaw, Henry. The Life of Saint Werburge of Chester, ed. C. A. Horstmann. EETS. N. Trübner, 1887. Also includes Goscelin of Saint Bertin’s Life of Wereburga. Note that her name can be spelled many different ways.

Felix's Life of Saint Guthlac, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge UP, 1985.

Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, ed. and trans. Ted Johnson South. D. S. Brewer, 2002. Summary.

Illtud and the Geese, English. Manuscript image for the Latin. John of Tynemouth Latin, here.

Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Saint Columban. Translation. Latin.

The Life of Saint Cuthbert in English Verse, ed J. T. Fowler. Surtees Society, 1891 (for the Carlisle Couplets and Egerton 3309 (olim Castle Howard Ms)

Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave. Cambridge UP, 1940.

Wereburga in John of Tynemouth, Latin.

Wereburga in William of Malmesbury, Latin.

York Minster Cuthbert Windows.

Secondary

Alexander, Dominic. Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages. Boydell & Brewer, 2008.

Baker, Malcolm. "Medieval Illustrations of Bede's Life of St. Cuthbert." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978): 16-49.

Barrett, Robert W. Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195-1656 University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. [for the politics of Bradshaw and Wereburga!]

Cavill, Paul. "Some Dynamics of Story-Telling: Animals in the Early Lives of St Cuthbert." Nottingham Medieval Studies 43 (1999): 1-20.

Colgrave, Bertram. "The St. Cuthbert Paintings on the Carlisle Cathedral Stalls." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 73.424 (1938): 17-21.

Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Cross, Tom Peete. Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature. Indiana University Press, 1952.

Crumplin, Sally. Rewriting History in the Cult of St Cuthbert from the Ninth to the Twelfth Centuries. (PhD Thesis, U of St Andrews, 2004).

Duncan, Sandra. "Signa De Caelo in the Lives of St Cuthbert: The Impact of Biblical Images and Exegesis on Early Medieval Hagiography." The Heythrop Journal 41.4 (2000): 399-412.

Gretsch, Mechthild. Aelfric and the Cult of Saints in Late Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge University Press, 2006 (Chapter 3, “Cuthbert: from Northumbrian saint to saint of all England)

Letty, Nijhuis Jantje.'Deor and nytenu mid us': Animals in the Works of Ǽelfric (PhD Thesis, U College Cork, 2008).

Newlands, Carole E. "Bede and Images of Saint Cuthbert." Traditio 52 (1997): 73-109.

Taylor, Sunaura. "Beasts of Burden: Disability Studies and Animal Rights." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 191-222.

Wakeford, Mark Reginald. The British Church and Anglo-Saxon Expansion: The Evidence of Saints' Cults. (PhD Thesis, U of Durham, 1998) [enormously useful for collecting goose miracles]

Language Deprivation II: Past Babel and the Communal Care of Culture

by KARL STEEL

Solothurn history Bible 36v

Part I: Babel

[let me take this reference to BABEL to start off this post (4,000 words!) to call for donations to the BABEL Working Group, surely a communal luxury if ever there was one]

The myth of the existence of a single originary language dates at least to the Biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9). From very early on, commentators on both this story and that of Adam naming the animals concluded that this first language was Hebrew. For example, the apocryphal book of Jubilees, 12:25-26, has an angel teaching Abraham what it calls this "tongue of the creation." There are few outliers: some Muslim writers – al-Ṭabarī and al-Ya'qubi – proposed Syriac as the first tongue, as did the twelfth-century Syriac patriarch Michael. And one first-century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, includes an astonishing story, unique in the commentarial tradition, about the animals’ own Babel Tower. Once, all animals had spoken one language, until they had the audacity to ask for the immortality they believed the snake already enjoyed: God smote them for their pride, and they fell into mutual incomprehension. Philo does not believe it ("this also, as they say, is a fabulous story"), yet here it is nonetheless.

Christian exegesis on Babel tends concern itself with the plural verbs of Genesis 1:7 ("let us go down {descendamus} and confuse {confundamus}"), which demonstrate, they say, the existence of the Trinity. It often asserts — as did Remigius of Auxerre — that God did nothing new in dividing languages, but rather only divided the already existing category of language into different modes and into different forms of speaking and understanding (see also Peter Comestor): perhaps the actual creation of language, with all that implied about the creation of human reason, could happen only once; or perhaps even creation ex nihilo, of whatever sort, could happen only once; perhaps the divine imprimatur could not be granted to more than one language; or, finally, perhaps exegetes recoiled from imagining God creating a punishment.

But when they think to make an argument about the first language, Christian exegetes tend to agree with Jewish exegetes: at least from the time of Paradise up until the disruption of Babel, language was only Hebrew (eg, pseudo-Clementine Recognitions I,30; Isidore, Etymologies IX,1; and, here standing in for the twelfth century, Andrew of St Victor; see also Dante, pro I,6, and con here). Hebrew was preserved by Heber, hence "Hebrew" (Ranulf Higden and many others), which acquired its proper name only when it first had to be distinguished from other languages (Augustine City of God 16.4). Hebrew would be preserved – and here Christians distinguished themselves – because it was suitable that the language of salvation should first be proclaimed in the language through which death first entered the world (Alcuin of York; Remigius of Auxerre; Angelomus of Luxeuil). (for a thick set of further citations, Christian and Jewish, see Resnick 56-59).

Interestingly, the twelfth-century Maurice of [the Yorkshire Augustinian priory of] Kirkham (h/t) declared that since English had so few case endings, it was the closest language to Hebrew (235). While this error suggests something about the late twelfth-century Yorkshire perception of the relative complexity of English and French - England's other dominant tongue - I also have to wonder whether Maurice therefore believed English to be the next-closest language to the language of paradise. One is – or I am, anyway – inevitably reminded of Jan van Gorp (d. 1572), who used Herodotus’s Psamtik story to declare the supposedly Phrygian "bekkos" the same word as the Brabantian "becker" (baker), which proved the antiquity, and hence nobility, of the language of Antwerp (this is why, some of his critics claimed, that he took on the absurd name Goropius Becanus; thanks!, but cf). From Phrygian to Flemish, a conclusion that only seems to be sillier than claims about Hebrew.

Back to Babel: the most influential Christian exegete of the Middle Ages had other fish to fry. Like others, Augustine was bothered by the apparent contradiction between Genesis 11 and the several languages spoken by the Noah’s several sons in Genesis 10:5, 20, and 31: how and when did languages actually diversify (and, he might have asked, was the dispersal over the earth a blessing ("be fruitful and multiply") or a curse?). Augustine’s  Questions on the Heptateuch deals with one of these problems by proposing that the Babel story must be a flashback (in Latin; in French).

But on the topic of the original language, Augustine tends to be agnostic. While his City of God, cited above, does not deviate from the general trends of exegesis, his Literal Interpretation of Genesis allows only that Adam’s language, whatever it might have been (quaecumque autem illa lingua fuerit), could have survived to the present. His anti-Manichaean Genesis commentary proposes that God might have divided light from darkness by speaking Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, or some other language, but, in fact, "all these expressions," fiat lux and the like, "are adopted to our intellect….For with God there is pure intellect, without the noise and diversity of languages [sine strepitu et diversitate linguarum]."

Part II: (Not Only) Homo Infans

For those who really wanted to know, something more than speculation was needed. There had to be a test, and this test wondered about children, because they routinely demonstrate the transition from speechlessness to language. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies X.ii.9 correctly derives the Latin word "infans" from a combination of the negating prefix "in" and the present participle “fans” of the deponent verb "fari," to speak. An infant is a speechless human. But this is only our first age ("homo primae aetatis"). For an infant will learn speech, "quia adhuc fari nescit" (because it does not yet know how to speak), or it will acquire the full power of speech, once its body becomes suitable for speech, as "the expression of speech is small," because it "does not yet have a full set of teeth" (nondum enim bene ordinatis dentibus).

The first thing to observe is that Isidore characterizes languages as speaking: his verbs are "fari" and "loqui," verbs that involve the audible voice (several monastic rules, for example, limited or even forbade speech, but in some cases, elaborated "signa loquendi," signs for speaking, marked as a special form of speech simply by its being allowed, and by their distinction as signa). Furthermore, simply making noise would not have been an adequate proof of being human. The noise has to be determined to be understandable; otherwise, it was as good as silence. "Muteness" is a condition associated with animality – Old French uses "mue beste" often, while Isidore himself distinguishes "pecudibus mutis" (mute livestock) from humans – so that mere noise is effectively the same as silence.

The question is how this language emerges from silence. Isidore offers two answers, and in the process two ways of being infans, laying out without resolving the crux of the problem of the origin of language. Either humans have no speech until they learn it, or they have no speech until their body suits itself for its production. In the first conception, language is secondary to us, or it is primary to us as a group, exchanged between us in ongoing acts of teaching and care; in the latter, it belongs to us as much as our teeth do. Such a rooting of language in physical capacity frustrates ideals of disembodiment so common to claims of human rationality, for if language comes out with teeth, perhaps there is no quality that supposedly makes us more than mere bodies, and certainly more than "mere animals."

For Isidore, as for most thinkers, the homo infans passes its first age and then becomes homo loquens. On this point, I prefer Agamben, for whom infancy is a key critical term (for example, here and here, from The Agamben Dictionary). I cannot endorse his notion that the inexorably alien quality of language in us uniquely thrusts humans into historicity: as Steve Mentz reminded me in comments to my last post, some whale species have "cultural lives," and as the New York Times just reported, parrots too can have dialects, which they learn while young and then pass on in turn to members of their own group. Psittacus infans.

I am far more sympathetic to Agamben's insistence that speechlessness is both the necessary condition and the hope of speech. As much as anyone can, Agamben follows Benjamin in arguing that the basic thing language communicates is communication itself [and for my summary of Agamben, I am relying on his commentators rather than his Infancy and History (1978), which has, quite frankly, aged so poorly that I just can’t imagine reading the whole thing]. To be communication, communication must have silence with it; it needs its inbuilt inadequacy. Inadequacy preserves the possibility of communication being something more than a mere back and forth transmission of needs, desires, and aims, something more than what Benjamin called "the bourgeois conception of language." Thus this inadequacy, figured as a silence within speech, holds open the possible, which we might take as standing for Agamben's Messianic suspension of the relation between sovereignty and life, and which I prefer to take, perhaps more mundanely, as a preservation of the helplessness within any social encounter, and a preservation of a extra-linguistic referentiality in any communication.

What is always in communication is the “here I am” of speech, a “here I am” whose silence is the preexistent, inescapable vulnerability of having to be somewhere, of needing to be cared for, heard, and to take up attention that might be bestowed elsewhere. This "here I am" is also a "here we are." Infancy always is within all communication and all community, and all that hope for community. Infancy is always awaiting any attempt to get to the bottom of language, culture, and our civilizations.

Part III: Deprivation and Responsibility

Agobard of Lyon's copy of Tertullian talking about Language Deprivation

Isidore has nothing to say about practical efforts to resolve these questions, nor, in fact, do many medieval writers. These date back to Herodotus and his tale of Psamtik, a powerful and long-ruling Pharaoh of the twenty-sixth dynasty around whom other equally legendary stories clustered (for example, two first-century encyclopedias, Pliny’s Natural History (XXXVI.19) and Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia (I.48; I.56 in English), credit him with building the first labyrinth). Though the Egyptians reputed themselves to be the “oldest nation on earth,” others argued that the honor belongs to the Phrygians: Psamtik (whom Herodotus calls Psammetichus) wanted experimental confirmation. He commanded that two newborns taken from the common people be raised in isolation by a herdsman who was never to speak in their presence. After two years – and here I quote from an English translation of 1584, “both the little brats, sprawling at his feete, and stretching forth their handds, cryed thus: Beccos, Beccos,” which Psamtik and his advisers understood as the Phrygian word for bread. Later commentators have tended to misunderstand the importance of the story’s punchline: it is less about the origin of language than it is about ethnos: “Language,” as Margaret Thomas explains, “only entered into his plan through his assumption that he could identify the oldest people on the basis of linguistic evidence” (here): first people rather than first language.

The story had its doubters along with its misreaders, Herodotus himself included, who numbers it among the “foolish tales” repeated by the Greeks. Scholars of our own era have observed (through what perhaps may be circular reasoning) that the experimental method seems more Greek than Egyptian, and, in misguided quibble, that the word "Beccos" sounds Egyptian, not like the (mostly lost) Phrygian tongue. Modern professionals in early childhood development and linguistics – but also, dismayingly, some cultural historians – sometimes take the story literally: they trouble to dispute the validity of its design, and flaunt their conscience by condemning Psamtik’s cruelty (for some treatments, here; here ("a surprising story, if true"); "supposedly conducted"; "utterly preposterous experiment"; an "oddity of history"; disapproval of this "peculiar brand of child abuse"; and an amusing delineation of Psamtik’s logical errors, including a failure to distinguish between logos and glossa).

Medieval Europe probably didn’t know the story. Herodotus would get no Latin translation until the middle of the fifteenth century, while his Psamtik story slides into European vernaculars only with Pedro Mexia’s widely popular 1540 Silva de varia lección (and from thence, among other routes, to Claude Gruget’s 1552 French translation; here in English, from 1571). Even by first century of our era, Herodotus tended to be cited, by Cicero among others, only through intermediaries (see Félix Racine here). Until the Renaissance, there is little evidence that the story had any readers, first or second hand, despite its being from the first few books of the history, accessible even to the lazy, the harried, and the only pretentiously learned. This remains the pattern.

Quintilian may be rare exception, although he never quite sustained a a regular interest among medieval readers. He explains that "all language" [or "all speech"; omnem sermonem] comes to us by hearing:

Hence infants brought up, at the command of princes, by dumb nurses and in solitude, were destitute of the faculty of speech, though they are said to have uttered some unconnected words. (Institutes X.1)

Yet the plural "princes" and likewise plural "words" (unless he is counting Bekkos twice) suggest that even Quintilian either got the story second-hand or, less likely, that he knew of yet another ancient experiment.

Two brief allusions survive in early Christian writing. Clement of Alexandria’s Exhortation to the Greeks (the Protrepticus) argues that even if "the Phrygians are shown to be the most ancient people by the goats of the fable," neither they nor the Arcadians nor the Egyptians nor whatever ethnos we claim to be predate the divine logos, responsible for all of us. Clement’s universalist argument (cf Galatians 3:28 and Colossians 3:11) stumbles through a highly compressed allusion not to Herodotus, but rather to an ancient, confused or confusing commentary on an allusion to Herodotus in Aristophanes’s Clouds. The commentary reads that if "goats nursed the children" – which somehow transforms a human herdsman into a female goat – "it is no wonder that hearing the goat they imitated her voice, and it is a coincidence that such an expression occurs among the Phrygians." No later reader rescues Clement from this muddle: surviving medieval manuscripts of the Protepticus are exceedingly scarce, and so far as I know, it finds no Latin translator until 1551. Even now, Protepticus tends to be Clement’s least-studied work.

Around the same time, in the last decade of the second century, Tertullian’s To the Heathens (Ad Nationes) tells the story at greater length, in an argument that begins by demanding that the Romans explain what they mean by describing Christians as a "third race" (distinct from the polytheism of Romans and Greeks, and distinct as well from the Jews; this phrase, sometimes used by Christians themselves, sometimes used as an insult against them, conceptually overlaps with the idea of a "third gender"). With what can only be associative logic, Jerome then retells Herodotus’s story of Psamtik, which he probably acquired from a historical compilation (Racine 209; perhaps Varro’s lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum): Tertullian focuses on an alternate version, only quickly summarized in Herodotus, in which it’s not a herdsman who tends the children, but a nurse whose tongue has been amputated. This is the field of battle Tertullian settles on: no one could possibly survive this wound, the removal of "the very organ of the breath of life"! Therefore – one can imagine him spitting triumphantly – the story must be false. He has nothing to say about the origin of language itself. Only one medieval manuscript of this work survives, a ninth-century copy owned by none other than the great polemicist Agobard of Lyons; but I know of no medieval quotation of or even allusion to Tertullian’s retelling of story, nor would it appear again until 1625, long after Herodotus and Psamtik made their way back into European writing.

The next historical account of the story appears an astonishing 1700 years after Herodotus, in the thirteenth-century chronicle of the Franciscan historian Salimbene di Adam, who, several decades after the events he claims to be recording, explains that Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, wanted to know what language children would spontaneously produce if they were never spoken to, or even dandled (blandirentur; in Latin; modern English translation here). Would it be Greek, Latin, or Arabic, or perhaps their parental language, the kind that can be acquired without training, as if – although Salimbene does not say this – one’s particular ethnic language, of whatever sort, sprang from children naturally, and that therefore there were no universal, foundational tongue? This, says Salimbene, is what Frederick wanted to learn. Instead, he learned this: without affection, babies die [since "non enim vivere possent sine aplausu et gestu et letitia faciei et blanditiis baiularum et nutricum suarum": one paraphrase here; for a brief treatment of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin thinking about early child care, Mary Martin McLaughlin].

Salimbene includes his story amid a set of the emperor’s other enormities. He had a scribe’s hand cut off for spelling his name "Fredericus" instead of his preferred "Fridericus"; he had a man sealed and drowned in a winecask to demonstrate that the soul dies with the body (a point Salimbene counters with a flurry of scriptural citations); and he ordered one of his men go hunting, and the other to sleep through the day, and when the hunter returned, had them both cut open to see who had better digested his food: Salimbene meant Frederick to be understood as a monster. The language deprivation experiment is just one more example of tyranny, not a historical fact in any simple sense.

It is harder to imagine a context for the final example from medieval Europe, which comes from a sixteenth-century Scottish historian, Robert Lindsey, who reports that James IV (d. 1513) had a mute woman raise two children on Inchkeith, a barren island of the Firth of Forth, North of Edinburgh. It is short enough to be quoted in full:

The king also caused tak ane dumb voman, and pat her in Inchkeith, and gave hir tuo bairnes with hir, and gart furnisch hir in all necessares thingis perteeaning to thair nourischment, desiring heirby to knaw quhat languages they had when they came to the aige of perfyte speech. Some sayes they spake guid Hebrew, but I knaw not by authoris rehearse, etc

That final, frustrating "etc" suggests that Lindsey may have had more to say about the matter. But this is it. Later, Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather would scoff at Lindsey: "it is more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like goats and sheep on the island."

And this, combined with my blog post on Akbar and his afterlife, provides a complete record of language deprivation experiments recorded in histories, from Herodotus to the seventeenth century, in other words, 2500 years. Nearly all follow four key points from the pattern laid down by Herodotus.

• While the children may be raised in an isolated hut or a fortified, well-guarded house, no account imagines the children denied adequate food, shelter, or clothing, only Salimbene de Adam’s account of Frederick II imagines the children denied emotional care: these stories are not presentiments of the several modern, horrific cases of children suffering in appalling confinement for years on end, alone with an uncommunicative, or crueler parent or caregiver; for the most part, all the children are deprived of is spoken communication with adults.
• Next, the experiment always takes place out of sight of the potentate: practical reasons demand this (the children cannot hear speech, and the potentate and his court need to speak), but it also ensures that in those rare cases where the children produce spoken language, the potentate never directly witnesses language’s emergence: the mystery of whatever truth is sought (whether ethnic, linguistic, or religious) is always screened from the direct observation of the party that first concocted the experiment.
• All involve multiple children (between two and thirty, but never just one).
• Finally, from the perspective of the potentate, the experiment is generally a failure: the attempt to find the true origins of an ethnos or language, or an infantile (and therefore “spontaneous”) proof of the superiority of a given faith almost never occurs.

These attempts do not seek to return to the first conditions of creation. To my knowledge, stories of the creation of humans tend not to imagine humans created as infants, or even as a crowd. The Genesis tradition certainly does not begin in silence, but with (in the second creation story, in Genesis 2) God’s supervision as Adam bestows names on animals, most of whom are given no chance to speak back, and certainly no chance to name themselves.

Instead, these experiments attempt to recapitulate an experience common to all humans, all of whom begin in infancy. This experiment is both a grand experimental investigation into the early days of the human species, following the common metaphorization of history as an individual lifecycle of birth, maturity, and decline, and an attempted understanding of the origins of any given individual, who know without remembering that they acquired language some time after coming into existence.

Yet these are not experiments with individuals. That the experiment is conducted with a crowd of forcibly speechless children suggests two key contradictions at the heart of the deprivation experiment. First, they seek to discover proof that language spontaneously emerges, while also recognizing that language is a cultural product, developed and shared between people. Attempts to discover the "authentic" practice – often considered to be the same as the supposed oldest practice, equally presupposed to have kept its purity across time – tend to want practices that just happen, without predetermination. These hunts for the authentic are therefore hunts for culture that inherently distrust the secondary, considered character of culture: they want a natural culture, as if anything acquired by deliberation, desire, and choice must be inherently suspect. They therefore want the benefits of language, ethnicity, and religion, for example, without having to own up to their choice to live through their particular manifestations of these categories. They want culture without responsibility.

Second, they want the find the origin of language while also recognizing that the language’s purpose is interpersonal communication. Though the experiment wants to know if the authentic language (or ethnicity, or religion) lurks within any given child, it also knows that these practices are always practices of a group: it is impossible to imagine an ethnos or a religious community of one, for example. To put this another way, the experiment (almost always) fails because a practice that has the appearance of being inherent to a group is necessarily an emergent and developmental practice, whose feedback structure frustrates any notion of any single origin.

It is therefore not accidental that these experiments are conducted with children. It’s not simply that children are made to function as historically "prior" to adults, though the connection between child and adult that itself maintains and develops culture means that the child is, culturally speaking, secondary to the adult. It is also that children are considered to be free of culture. To deprive children of the care of culture is thus a chance to wait for culture to emerge without our having to care about it.

No wonder the experiments fail. But of course they are not whole failures. In one instance, sign language emerges, taught by “mute” nurses to the children. In another, the children acquire an ordered voice by imitating the sounds of goats. Communication happens, and it happens without the need for spoken or even a human voice. Connections are made.

And what the reveal, again, is that silence amid language. This is not the silence of failure, an aporia or impossibility at the heart of language, though of course the deprivation experiment might be taken that way. The language deprivation experiment is only partially about language, and those who take it as being about language may be overestimating the absence of silence and vulnerability in their own lives.

My preference is to take the supposed failure of the experiment as evidence of the inescapable persistence of bodies. It is a story whose truth the need for community and care. It is a story that produces another witness to the fact that the transformation of silence into any kind of voice requires someone to take the trouble to listen, to talk back, to acknowledge in any way that this too, in this moment, is someone who needs our help. What the potentate sees, finally, is what he should have known all along: his own helplessness, which cannot be overcome.

Akbar and the Silenced Children: Language as Heritage, or Language as Community?

by KARL STEEL

Chinese Parrot, c 1700, collection of Marie-Antoinette, c 1785

As part of the process of assembling, expanding, and (re)writing the material for Book 2, I’ve returned to the problem of “feral children,” which I first visited here six years (!) ago, when I first stumbled across the Wolf Child of Hesse. It’s now been ten days since I decided language deprivation experiments needed to be part of this discussion.

The form of this chapter will therefore be two studies of isolated children – first, feral ancestors, like Romulus and Remus, isolated from mundane humans; next, the child raised in silence, a supposedly true representation of the human condition, because they have been isolated from the secondary, cultural accumulation of the larger society – and then, finally, a study of a small set of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century feral children stories in which the children find community with wolves: from isolation to a lupine, more than human sociality.

I now have a lot of material on Herodotus, and its classical afterlife in commentaries on Aristophanes, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and even, perhaps, Quintilian, which I might share here; I have my material on Salimbene de Adam’s record of Frederick II, and even that barest reference to James IV’s deprivation experiment that we find Robert Lindsay’s Historie and Chronicles of Scotland. Outside of the historical texts, speculations about isolation and language appear in Pedro Mexia’s Silva de varia lección, the Qabus-nama, and in the medieval Islamic philosophical novels translated into Latin as Philosophus Autodidactus and Theologus Autodidactus. On the topic of isolation, Avincenna’s famous “floating man” thought experiment may be cited too. Once we abandon simplistic notions of historicity and recognize that thought experiments themselves are also “historical,” the archive fills and expands and fills and so on.

In the interests of your time, though, I’m sharing only my material on Akbar’s experiment. This is all new for me, a medievalist trained in the later Middle Ages and English, French, and Latin materials: it’s not just that the sixteenth-century Emperor Akbar is early modern; it’s that the primary materials outside of Europe on his experiment are all in Persian, so I have had to rely on translations, perhaps disreputable, by Victorian Orientalists. But I had my quarry when I stumbled across a story about “Rege terrae Magor” while searching for early modern references to Herodotus. What could this Magor be?

Of course it’s the Mughals. You already knew that, but learning the obvious took me more than a day to figure out, and that here in Paris, where a day has more value than crummy old Brooklyn. In the process, I reconstructed a chain of witnesses to the experiment, tracking the story’s changes from one version to the next, from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century. I also determined that credulous, sloppy repetitions of stories of language deprivation experiments run from the present all the way back to Tertullian and even Quintillian and probably Herodotus himself, and that almost no one almost no one can keep the story straight from one telling to the next. That is, all these tellers always get it exactly right for whatever their needs are at the moment.

The story of Akbar’s experiment has often been told. This lengthy post is better cited than most tellings, so even without my final interpretations, it may have some value. My real interest here, however, is in attempts to think through the problem of the origin of language. Language, as a sign, proof, and indispensable tool of reason, attests to our human existence as being more than merely biological, in there being something in or of us that is mere than bare life. Where could the extra thing possibly come from? Answering this question is the concern of these and so many other language deprivation experiments: not to take something away from us, but to discover, within the crucible of this experiment, what our core self might be. The deprivation experiment wants to give us the gift of ourselves, what we really are once all that might be thought to be only secondary to us has been burnt away.

But what is finds itself is catastrophe. Or, despite itself, community.

The first account of Akbar’s experiment appears the Akbarnama of Abul Fazl, Akbar’s own court historian, which may be the only version that has any claim to being an eye-witness account: to prove that speech comes from hearing, Akbar had several children raised by “tongue-tied” wetnurses, confined to a building that came to be called the “dumb house.” When Akbar visited the house in 1582, four years after the children were first interred, he heard “no cry…nor any speech…no talisman of speech, and nothing came out except the noise of the dumb.” Much the same story (but without anything said about nurses or guards) would be told decades later, the anonymous Dabestan-e Mazaheb (“School of Religions), written between 1645 and 1658, which finished with a wonderful assertion about the deep time of human cultural development: the experiment proves that “letters and language are not natural to man,” but only the result of instruction and conversation, and that therefore (!) “the world is very ancient.”

The anti-Akbarian Montaḵab al-tawārīḵ of ʿAbd-ul-Qadir Bada'uni lays the foundations of the story’s several European versions. This work, the Selection of Chronicles, worries over Akbar’s disdain for religion, and Islam in particular; like Salimbene writing about Frederick II, Bada’uni may be portraying an impious tyrant who goes too far in his curiosity. First, however, Bada’uni attributes the experiment to Akbar’s astonished encounter with a man who can hear, despite having “no ears nor any trace of the orifice of the ear”: to test the origins of language, he has several infants locked up, with “well-disciplined” (rather than mute) nurses, who are commanded not to give the children “any instruction in speaking.” Then, without any transition or explanation, Bada'uni changes Akbar’s motivation: he now wants to test the idea that “everyone that is born is born in a state of nature” (George Ranking translation) or that "everyone that is born is born with an inclination to religion" (Lowe? translation). Twenty children are locked up in what comes to be called the “dumb house,” and “three or four years” later, none can speak. Nothing more is said about the earless man.

The language deprivation experiment is absent from several of the early European accounts of Akbar’s court. Giovanni Battista Peruschi’s 1597 Informatio del regno, et stato del gran re di Mogor (published in Latin the following year, with additional material on Japan) limits itself to worrying over possibilities for gaining the Emperor for Roman Catholicism, while the thirteen pages of the True Relation without all Exception, of Strange and Admirable Accidents, which lately happened in the Kingdome of the Great Magor, from 1622, are little but an exoticizing fantasy about the possibilities unleashed by absolute royal power: thus it devotes several of its thirteen pages to the story of a problem-solving ape, like a cleverer Hans, frolicking among the Mughal courtiers, including his two hundred “Boyes…which hee keepeth for unnaturall and beastly uses.”

Instead, the story first enters Europe via the letters of another Jesuit missionary, Jerónimo Xavier (d. 1617), who draws on either on Bada’uni or one of Bada’uni's own informants to establish one of the main lines of the story’s European reception. Claiming to have had it from Akbar himself, Xavier explains that “nearly twenty years ago,” Akbar closed up “thirty children,” and “put guards over them so that the nurses might not teach them their language.” There is nothing about an earless man, nor any received wisdom about natural religious inclinations. Instead, Akbar had decided “to follow the laws and customs of the country whose language was that spoken by the children.” Since “none of the children came to speak distinctly,” Xavier calls the experiment a “failure”; for Akbar, it may have been something else, since it allowed him to justify following “no law but his own.” Here Xavier presumably means the short-lived, syncretic faith of Dīn-i Ilāhī, designed by Akbar himself.  What had been a story about the origins of language becomes one about what we might call the natural voice of divinity, and, more practically, about the early modern Roman Catholic failure to make Akbar their Prester John, that imaginary medieval Christian king of Asia or “Ethiopia” that Europe hoped would swoop in and crush Islam from what Europe must have thought of as “behind.”

European speculative scholarship happily stuffed the story into a set of examples that invariably, as they still do, began with Herodotus. In a discussion considering the immutability of language, Christop Besold’s 1632 updated version of his De natura populorum tells it exactly as Xavier does, but without saying anything about the muteness of the (thirty) children’s keepers. We find it again in August Pfeiffer’s Introductio in Orientem (1693), on whether the Hebrew language is natural, where Pfeiffer cites Besold, and then references Hebrew masters who claim that the Hebrew language was “implanted naturally” (naturaliter impantatam) in the first human. In English, we find the story preserved in these essentials in the chapter “Of the Great Mogor, or Mogoll” of Samuel Purchas’s 1626 travel writing.

Secularized, greatly shortened versions of the story appear in a 1632 entry in the journal of the English traveler Peter Mundy (“hee caused little children to brought up by dumb Nurses to know what languages they would naturally speak, but it is sayd that in a long time they spake nothing at all”), and on the very first page the Danish scientist Ole Borch’s 1675 On the Causes of the Diversity of Languages, whose Latin is repeated word-for-word in Christian Augustus Ludwig’s 1730 Brief Commentary on the Property of Names. Like so many more recent retellings of the story, both writers fold the story in among citations of the few other language deprivation experiments they know – Herodotus and Quintilian in this case – and in Borch, even the sheep-boy of Ireland, whose preference for the choicest pasture was recounted in 1641 by Rembrandt’s famous Doctor Tulp. Borch’s inclusion of this story amid his examples may be the first time an animal-raised child was deliberately understood not as a wonder, but as just one more, sad example of linguistic deprivation.

In virtually none of these versions do the children ever acquire anything but inarticulate noises. The one exception is François Catrou’s 1708 Histoire générale de l'empire du Mogol (General History of the Mughal Empire), which he claims to have based on Niccolao Mannuchi’s 1698 Storia do Mogor (The History of Mughal India), itself based in turn on accounts of Xavier and others. Like Borch, Mannuchi holds that Akbar is seeking the original language. Some thought it would be Hebrew, others "Chaldean" (meaning Syriac? Persian?); and others Sanskrit, "which is their Latin." Mannuchi has only twelve children, and says nothing about their nurses, only that no one, "under pain of death," is to speak to the children "or allow them to communicate with each other" (!). When the children turned twelve, they were questioned, but responded only by cringing, and remained "timid [and] fearful" for the rest of their lives.

With one enormous change, Catrou reproduces Mannuchi’s story of Akbar’s “bizarre” experiment, inspired, Catrou says, by Akbar having heard that Hebrew was a "natural language.” The emperor shuts up twelve children with twelve mute nurses, and a male porter, also mute, who is never to open the doors of the "château" in which they have all been confined. Twelve years later, to witness and deliver the verdict, Akbar has filled his court with judges, led by a Jew who will question the children in Hebrew. Another “failure”: all are astonished ("on fut tout étonné") that they speak no language. This may just be garbled; or Catrou may have drawn these details from now lost manuscripts, used to supplement Manucchi’s account; or – continuing the longstanding habit of scholars of language deprivation experiments – he may have simply dramatized the story further, or folded into it what he expected to find.

However it happened, what Catrou provides astounds: for in this version, for the first time, the children do in fact acquire language. In no earlier version of any account that pretends to be a true history – in neither Herodotus nor Quintilian nor Salimbene nor Robert Lindsey – are the children able to communicate anything but their distress, or some fundamental language. But here they have sign language, taught to them by their nurse; “they express their thoughts only by gestures, which they use in place of words”: in Catro: "Ils avoient appris de leur Nourrice à s'en parler. Seulement ils exprimoient leurs pensées par des gestes qui leur tenoient lieu de paroles," or, as the 1826 English translation strangely expands the passage, “they had learnt, from the example of their nurses, to substitute signs for articulate sounds. They used only certain gestures to express their thoughts, and these were all the means which they possessed of conveying their ideas, or a sense of their wants.”

This detail has been understood by some writers as evidence that the Akbar story might be more than just another mutated iteration of the story that first appears in Herodotus; to put it simply these writers – linguists and advocates for the disabled among them – want this story of a sign language community passed on from nurses to children to be evidence that Akbar really conducted this experiment. Thus it could be a heroic story about Akbar underestimating his “mute” nurses, who had a language he and his philosophers were unable to understand. Community had survived after all, even amid this deprivation. I reluctantly doubt it: though certainly important to the history of disability, negotiation, and accommodation, this element of the story arrived late in its tradition, and likely has much more to do with developments in sign language in Europe than it does with the history of disability in the Mughal court.

This is not to say it lacks all truth. None of these stories should be taken as facts in any simple sense. All should be understood as being as legendary as any other bizarre tale about powerful rulers. They are nonetheless still true, in that they are true records of an interest, as real a record as any other fiction, which, as Anna Kłosowska observes of the truth of medieval stories, correspond “to an absolute reality--not of existence, but of desire that calls fiction into being… and [the] continuing desire for it performed by readers.”

The true record here is not the events but the concern, of course, with the relation between the authentic, the natural, and origins. Consider the version of the story in the “things omitted” section of Daniel Sennert’s medical manual, his Paralipomenon (written after 1631), the first time the story appears outside a missionary text or a travel narrative. Sennert tells the story as Xavier does, but then slides, surprisingly, into an anecdote about parrots, which, as he explains, likewise cannot learn to talk without being taught ("nunquam sua sponte ullam humanam vocem profereunt"). He concludes with an incidental tidbit of parrot lore from Apulius's Florida 12 (teach a parrot to curse, and it will curse unceasingly, day and night, unless you cut out its tongue or send it back to the forest). With this, Sennert has recognized that speech originates in imitation, and indeed taught imitation. Sennert does not imagine that parrots spontaneously imitate language. They need instruction. At the same time, certain parrots (those with five toes, like humans) are better than others at learning languages: what has to be taught is not merely a cultural activity, but an interaction between bodily affordances and training. As Haraway writes in her “Manifesto for Cyborgs”: “one is too few, but two is too many.” Go back far enough, and what’s found is just this: accommodation, where language acquires the character of seeming natural by an entanglement of training and imitation that coalesces with bodies given the chance to thrive amid conditions designed for them. A “dumb house” is not one of these spaces, unless the nurses subvert the experiment.

Recall as well August Pfeiffer’s Introductio in Orientem, which follows its Akbar story with “others argue with those Hebrew masters who say that the Hebrew language was implanted in the first human” (Ebaorum Magistri alias disputant contra illos, qui Ebraeam linguam, ut primam homini naturaliter implantatam esse dicant). This strange metaphor (one might instead expect a metaphor of respiration) at least implicitly recognizes the manufactured character of humans in the Genesis creation myths. If being natural requires springing from or being born from itself or something like itself (as the word “nature” comes from “nasci,” to be born), if it requires spontaneity, humans are not, at their root, natural (barring a few outlying philosophers). Like the rest of organized creation, like everything after the first waters over which God’s form floated, humans are a manufactured product. Language, reason, and the soul: none of this is any more “natural” than we are.

Barring Robert Lindsey, where the children definitely speak Hebrew, and perhaps Herodotus, where the children are understood to have spoken Phrygian, the hunt for an origin, whether of ethnicity (Herodotus), religion (Akbar, in many instances), or language (Frederick II, and often Akbar), gets us nothing but nonsense. Language must be passed on in groups. The hunt for origins reveals not purity, not a definitive answer, but a community, and then, past that, nothing but the most wretched helplessness, a community that has arrived too late for help.

Isolation gets us only noise; being comes with the break into the noise, the wave-form collapse, the phenomenon. The hunt for origins is often a hunt for an excuse, a way past responsibility, to find things as they “really are.” But what we find instead is only one more requirement to have made a decision. What we find is the necessity of care.