For a Medieval History of Gesture Communication

SLS 21 (1978), 353-280 0 1978, Linstok Press, Inc. FOR A MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF GESTURE COMMUNICATION Luigi Romeo It is well known that what is acceptable today in any culture may tomorrow become taboo. The history of social anthropology needs no references nor footnotes for examples. The reverse is also true in a typical sociological syndrome such as "silence is golden" vs. "the squeaking wheel gets the oil" -what was taboo yesterday may become not only acceptable but also encouraged by government institutions in the interest of "scientific" inquiry. There is nothing unusual in this type of human development, since it is a prerogative of Homo mutans. Among the disappearing taboos of superficial nature -as distinct from the more basic taboos such as incestcommunication through gestures appears to have acquired lately the status of avant-garde research. Psychiatrists, linguists, semioticists, neurologists, anthropologists, politicians , television newscasters, and even zoo-keepers have of late become aware of nonvocal communication as a respectable area of scholarly investigation-once the domain of only a few strange individuals and organizations. Gestures, as components of sign language, are even taught to nonhumans who would quite possibly prefer to have their own communication systems deciphered by another species rather than having one imposed on them. It was not long ago, however, that gesturing for the purpose of communication was regarded as not only asocial (if not queer and inferior) but also as dangerous. On the one hand, some scholars take extreme positions by considering Sign Language Studies 21 gestures as a "linguaggio completo. " At any rate, there is no question that the role of gesture in communication is now so fundamental that it is re-exhumed even to corroborate "new" theories of language origins . It is not without wonder that names such as Vico (fl. 1700), De Jorio 1832, Cushing 1892, B~renger-F~raud 1896, Cocchiara 1932, and others from the most diverse backgrounds and interests are retrieved from For the concept of "linguaggio completo" including linguaggio dei gesti see Tagliavini 1969: 15-17, in which the author refers to the works of several scholars, including De Jorio, Mallery (1881), and Cocchiara. Tagliavini, however, includes for the first time in any work on linguistics the contribution of De Jorio in a footnote on page 16, saying in acknowledgement nothing more than "un interessante volume. " Once the domain of academe, the importance of gestures in communication is now spread even among laymen by mass communication media such as Thomson 1975: 65. Moreover, most linguists used to consider their profession as limited to grammatical matters and thus did not look over the boundaries traced by ars grammatica in a narrow sense (i.e. grammar devised in the last twentyfive centuries, starting with Protagoras). Why? Well, again, the self-assumed task of the linguist in the past was only grammar (a rather dreadful subject), and thus once Homo sapiens sapiens was accepted and studied as already born with a so-called universal grammar (as reported in the various geneses of several religions), the journey from that point of departure is not a laborious one along mechanistic lines. Only lately has there been an explosion of interest in nonverbal "language" systems along "linguistic" lines. For the sake of the history of anthropology, one should not forget, however, that as early as the sixteenth century , before the teenager label of Homo sapiens sapiens, the French scholar Bovillus (1510-1511: 22) had already defined Homo homo as that stage of the perfection of man since it is he who created himself through his intelligence after acquiring consciousness of himself and the world. It is significant that while Cushing was an anthropolo- Luigi Romeo quasi ovlivion in the rush to re-examine the alleged uniqueness of Homo sapiens sapiens. 3 On the other hand, inquiries of "scientific" nature are not the product of modern, or contemporary, scholarship alone. During the last one hundred years in fact segments of history have often been outlined tracing a concern for sign language back to ancient civilizations. But in spite of this, at times one has the impression, in reading contemporary exuberant research and reporting, that human beings gesticulate for the purpose of communication only in...