David Cram and Jaap Maat (eds.), Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf. The Popham Notebook and Associated Texts. John Wallis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017

John Wallis (1613-1703) was a truly eclectic mind. He combined his prolific and well-known work as a mathematician (the 1656 Arithmetica infinitorum established his reputation as the most important mathematical scholar of his day) with a parallel and equally profound engagement with language and languages. This found expression not just in works devoted to music (in 1682 he produced an edition of Ptolemy’s Harmonica) and logic (Institutio Logicae, whose first Latin edition was published in 1687), but also – and most notably –in Grammatica linguae anglicanae. Cui praefigitur, De loquela sive sonorum formatione tractatus grammatico-physicus, published in Oxford in 1653. This treatise is closely connected, on both a theoretical and practical-experimental level, to some crucial documents which enable us to reconstruct Wallis’ method to teach written and spoken languages to deaf people.