Toward a Universal Language of Motion: Reflections on a Seventeenth-Century Muscle Man

Abstract

In 1649 a little-known English savant, John Bulwer, published in London a book called Pathomyotomia, or A dissection of the significative muscles of the affections of the minde. The author was a physician, and the title might suggest a medical text, but Buiwer's "dissection" is figurative rather than literal. His concern is with somatic signification. How does the body convey meanings? How are commands conveyed from the spirit to the muscles? How do "affections"—passions, ideas, responses, projects—pass from the silent and inaccessible inward reaches of the mind to the world? The obvious passageways, of course, are speech and writing, but central to Bulwer's inquiry is his conviction that speech and writing are only part of the signifying resources of human beings, and not the most reliable part at that. For language is notoriously slippery, deceptive, and unstable—notoriously, from the point of view of both theology and science.