In many places you will read that the first book published by a deaf person was by Pierre Desloges, in 1779, a claim you will even find on Wikipedia as of this post's publication date. It is incorrect: three hundred years earlier, in the 15th century, a deaf nun named Teresa de Cartagena had already written the first book. The men of her time accused her of plagiarism, claiming that a deaf woman could not have written something like that, and she answered with a second book that is considered the first feminist text in the Castilian language.
In this post we review the oldest literary works written by deaf people that are known to us, beginning where history should always have begun.
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| AI-generated illustration of busts |
Teresa de Cartagena: the first known deaf woman author in history
Teresa de Cartagena was born around 1425 in Burgos, into a powerful religious family. Her grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi, had converted to Christianity around 1390 and went on to become bishop of Burgos under the name Pablo de Santa María. Her uncle, Alonso de Cartagena, was also a bishop. Teresa entered a Franciscan convent around 1440, later moving to the monastery of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas.
At some point between 1453 and 1459, Teresa became completely deaf as a result of an illness. The manuscript of her first work says so plainly: "seyendo apasyonada de graves dolençias, espeçialmente aviendo el sentido del oýr perdido del todo" (afflicted by grave illnesses, especially having lost the sense of hearing entirely). About twenty years after the onset of her deafness, in the 1470s, she wrote Arboleda de los enfermos (Grove of the Sick), a treatise in which she reflects on the experience of deafness and the isolation it caused her.
Teresa's description of deaf loneliness in a hearing environment can be recognized by any deaf person who lives cut off from communication in a hearing environment, centuries later:
Quando estoy sola, soy acompañada de mí mesma y de ese pobre sentido que tengo, pero quando en compañía de otrie me veo, yo soy desamparada del todo, ca nin gozo del consorçio o fabla de aquellos, nin de mí mesma me puedo aprovechar - When I am alone, I am accompanied by myself and by this poor sense that I have; but when I find myself in the company of others, I am utterly forsaken, for I neither enjoy their company or conversation nor can I make use of myself (Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los enfermos, c. 1475)
Several male intellectuals of her time accused Teresa of plagiarism, unable to accept that a deaf woman could have written something of that quality. In response, Teresa wrote a second treatise, Admiraçión operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God), in which she defends women's intellectual capacity to read, write, and think just as men do. For a number of researchers, this work is the first feminist text written in the Castilian language.
Muchas vezes me es fecho entender […] que algunos de los prudentes varones e asimesmo hembras discretas se maravillan o han maravillado de un tratado que, la gracia divina administrando mi flaco mugeril entendimiento, mi mano escrivió - I have often been given to understand […] that some of the prudent men, and likewise discerning women, marvel or have marveled at a treatise that my hand wrote, divine grace guiding my weak womanly understanding (Teresa de Cartagena, Admiraçión operum Dey, c. 1476-1478)
Both works are preserved in the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. According to the Springer Nature encyclopedia, Teresa de Cartagena's Arboleda is the only first-person testimony by a deaf person known from all of premodern Christendom.
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| Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where Teresa de Cartagena's works are preserved (photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia) |
Why has she been forgotten?
If Teresa de Cartagena wrote three centuries before Pierre Desloges, why do so many sources still credit Desloges as the first deaf author? It is hard to answer this question, but perhaps these are some of the reasons.
First, it could be the type of deafness and its context: Teresa became deaf in adulthood (between the ages of 28 and 34), not from birth or in childhood like Pierre Desloges. Although her deafness was total, she was someone who had heard before and who wrote in the spoken language she already mastered.
The second reason could be that Teresa de Cartagena has been studied mainly by medievalists and Hispanists, while most research in deaf history has been carried out chiefly in English and French. In 1779, Desloges wrote a book that explicitly defended sign language and described the deaf community in Paris, which probably fit better within the field of Deaf Studies.
Last but not least, there could be gender bias. It is well known that history written under patriarchy shows a long tradition of erasing women's achievements.
It would therefore be only fair to recognize Teresa de Cartagena as the first known deaf woman writer, and Pierre Desloges as the first deaf author to write in defense of sign language and of the deaf community. Or perhaps to distinguish between the first deaf woman writer and the first deaf man writer.
Pierre Desloges: the first deaf book in defense of sign language
In 1779, in Paris, a bookbinder named Pierre Desloges published Observations d'un sourd et muèt sur un cours élémentaire d'éducation des sourds et muèts (Observations of a Deaf and Mute Man on an Elementary Course of Education for the Deaf and Mute). Desloges, who was 32 at the time, had become deaf at the age of seven from smallpox and did not encounter sign language until he was 27, when a deaf Italian man taught it to him.
As we noted earlier, Desloges's book is a public and explicit defense of sign language as a legitimate language. Desloges also described the existence of a signing deaf community in 18th-century Paris, showing that Old French Sign Language existed as a natural language before Abbé de l'Épée systematized it in his school.
Comme un Français qui voit sa langue dénigrée par un Allemand qui ne sait que quelques mots de français, j'ai cru devoir défendre ma langue contre les fausses imputations de cet auteur - Like a Frenchman who sees his language disparaged by a German who knows only a few words of French, I felt obligated to defend my language against this author's false accusations (Pierre Desloges, Observations d'un sourd et muèt, 1779)
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| Book written by Pierre Desloges in 1779 (image: public domain) |
Ferdinand Berthier: the deaf intellectual who received the Legion of Honor
Teresa de Cartagena and Pierre Desloges wrote a few books, but the French educator Ferdinand Berthier (1803-1886) built an entire intellectual career. At the age of eight he entered the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris (National Institute for Deaf Youth of Paris), studied under Auguste Bébian (one of the first hearing educators with a high level of sign language proficiency) and Jean Massieu (a pioneering deaf educator of his time), and ended up becoming a full professor at the very institute where he had been a student.
Starting in 1839, Berthier published several biographies of the key figures in deaf education in France (Sicard, Bébian, Massieu, Laurent Clerc), using this biographical writing as a tool to defend sign language against oralism. In 1834 he founded the famous "silent banquets" of Paris, annual gatherings of deaf people that were among the first organized acts of deaf cultural affirmation in history.
Finally, he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, a member of the Historical Institute of France, and president of the Société Centrale des Sourds-Muets, one of the first associations of deaf people in the world.
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| On September 30, 2003, Google published a Doodle celebrating the 220th anniversary of Ferdinand Berthier's birth (see here) |
Laura Redden Searing: war correspondent, poet, and the first deaf woman journalist
Across the Atlantic, in the United States, Laura Catherine Redden (1839-1923) became deaf at age 11 due to meningitis. She studied at the Missouri School for the Deaf, where she learned sign language, and began working as a writer for a newspaper in the city of St. Louis under the male pen name Howard Glyndon. The town of Glyndon (Minnesota) has borne his name since 1872.
In 1861 she moved to Washington as a war correspondent. She interviewed generals, covered battles, and wrote about Abraham Lincoln. In 1862 she published Notable Men in the House, a book of profiles of the congressmen of the day. In 1864 she published Idyls of Battle, and Poems of the Rebellion, possibly the first book of poetry about the American Civil War. On her travels through Europe, she came to learn four languages and published a second collection of poems, Sounds from Secret Chambers (1873).
In this post from Excepcionales, published in 2016, you can learn more about her.
E. Marlitt: the most widely read deaf novelist in 19th-century Germany
Perhaps the life story with the most twists on this list is that of E. Marlitt, the pen name of Friederieke Henriette Christiane Eugenie John (1825-1887), born in the small town of Arnstadt (Germany). Her parents had sent her to Vienna to study voice, thanks to the patronage of the princess of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, who had taken her in, impressed by her singing. But Eugenie became deaf, and her musical career came to an unexpected end.
Encouraged by those who read her correspondence, E. Marlitt began writing novels. In 1865 she published Die zwölf Apostel (The Twelve Apostles) in Die Gartenlaube, the most widely read newspaper in 19th-century Germany, with print runs of hundreds of thousands of copies.
Her second novel, Goldelse (1866), made her a publishing phenomenon. She published at least eight novels between 1865 and 1874, and her complete works were issued in ten volumes, translated into English, and adapted for film and television in Germany in the 21st century. Without a doubt, she was one of the most popular novelists of the Germany of her time.
Like Laura Redden, Friederieke Henriette used a pen name to avoid the sexist prejudice against women writers in the 19th century, although in her case she also did so to protect her own privacy because of the trauma of her truncated singing career.
Bonus: the first book about sign language in history (Madrid, 1620)
Pierre Desloges's book was not the first book in history in defense of sign language, but it was the first written in its defense by a deaf person.
More than 100 years before Desloges, also in Spain like Teresa de Cartagena, the Aragonese priest and linguist Juan Pablo Bonet published Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos (Reduction of Letters and the Art of Teaching the Mute to Speak) (1620), the first book in history on the education of deaf people, although Juan Pablo Bonet was hearing.
This book included the first documented manual alphabet in history: a one-handed system that, adapted successively, would make its way to French Sign Language and from there to ASL.
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| Plate that opens the representation of the manual alphabet in Juan Pablo Bonet's work |
Sources:
- Berthier, F. (2009 [1839-1852]). Forging Deaf Education in Nineteenth-Century France: Biographical Sketches of Bébian, Sicard, Massieu, and Clerc. Trans. Freeman G. Henry. Gallaudet University Press.
- Bonet, J.P. (1620). Reducción de las letras y arte para enseñar a hablar a los mudos. Madrid. Digitized copy: University of Oregon [last accessed: August 9, 2026].
- Cartagena, Teresa de (c. 1475). Arboleda de los enfermos and Admiraçión operum Dey. Ed. Lewis Hutton, Madrid, Real Academia Española, 1967. Analysis at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
- Castro-Ponce, C. E. (2026). Teresa de Cartagena. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages (pp. 799-803). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
- Cultura Sorda (2011). Teresa de Cartagena. Deaf writer and religious woman of the 15th century. At cultura-sorda.org [last accessed: August 9, 2026].
- Deaf History Europe. Pierre Desloges, Ferdinand Berthier [last accessed: August 9, 2026].
- Gallaudet University Library. Teresa de Cartagena (Guide to Deaf Biographies) [last accessed: August 9, 2026].
- Jones, J.Y. and Vallier, J.E. (2003). Sweet Bells Jangled: Laura Redden Searing, A Deaf Poet Restored. Gallaudet Classics in Deaf Studies, Vol. 4. Gallaudet University Press.
- Kim, Y. (2008). Teresa de Cartagena. In Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance. Springer Nature. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-76219-3_36-1.
- Lane, H. and Philip, F. (eds.) (2006). The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education. Gallaudet University Press.
- Marlitt, E. (1865-1874). Works published in Die Gartenlaube. Texts at Project Gutenberg.
- Poets.org. Laura Redden Searing [last accessed: August 9, 2026].
- RIT Libraries / Gallaudet (2022). Seven "First Deaf Women" [last accessed: August 9, 2026].
- Rivera Garretas, M.M. (2013). "Fue levado mi entendimiento": Teresa de Cartagena y la escritura mística en femenino. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
