This article strives to reconstruct the life and its representation of prelingual deaf Hester Koolaart (1683-1737) from Haarlem. She featured as a gifted pupil in scholarly publications by the physician Johann Conrad Ammann (1669-1724), who wrote about teaching deaf people to speak, read, and write in Surdus loquens (1692) and Dissertatio de loquela (1700), works that were widely translated and reprinted, remaining influential for centuries. After receiving training in speech and literacy from Ammann for over a year, Koolaart displayed her newly acquired language skills to academic visitors. Many of these visitors described their visits and Koolaart’s skills in letters to other scholars, and Ammann himself rarely failed to mention his star pupil in his correspondence with other scholars on the topic of his teaching method.² As such, Hester Koolaart still figures in studies on the history of deafness, but a detailed account of her life does not exist.

The bulk of studies on the history of deafness, deaf people, and deaf education primarily focuses on the period after the institutionalisation of deaf education at the end of the eighteenth century, with a focus on Western countries.³ Only recently has research begun to study the lives and lived experiences of deaf people, their language use, and their position in society outside the context of institutionalised deaf education.⁴ For the early modern Dutch Republic, in most cases, only anecdotal information about the lives of deaf people is available, even in the case of those who were privileged to be both exceptionally talented and born into affluent families. The lives of a few Dutch deaf people have been studied in depth. This is, for example, the case for the famous painter Hendrick Avercamp, as well as for the less famous Johannes Thopas, Maerten Boelema de Stomme, and Jan Jansz. de Stomme: all men, all born into upper-class families, and all painters.⁵ We do not dispose of written sources produced by these deaf persons themselves or other sources that show how they experienced their lives.⁶ For some of the painters, anecdotal reports of their communicative practices, indicating they were signers, are available. Apart from their signatures, no sources are indicating they were literate. The extent to which they were in regular contact with other signers is unclear.

With the case of Hester Koolaart, this article presents the first in-depth study into the life of a deaf woman from the Dutch Republic who also lived in Hessen, present-day Germany, for part of her life. Although there is no documentation in which Hester herself explicitly reflects on her position as a prelingual deaf person or on how she was represented by others, her life is, at least, relatively well documented by contemporaries. We have access to a wide range of sources about her life and representation. As Ammann’s star pupil, there is a relatively large set of eyewitness accounts of Koolaart’s speech and writing performances. As she was part of an intellectually driven elite family that left many written sources, we are also able to study letters and poems about Koolaart, or addressed to her. There is even one poem that was published under her name. The eyewitness reports of scientists (including Ammann’s) and the family-based writings (including Koolaart’s poem) are in this article jointly analysed with archival records to piece together an understanding of the lived experience of Hester Koolaart as a Dutch deaf woman in the early modern period.

The case of Hester Koolaart not only adds a female account to existing scholarship in the history of deafness, but it also enables us to confront her public image with snippets of her daily and more private life experience as a deaf person in a hearing family. In doing so, we read the so-called recovery narrative of Koolaart ‘against the grain’: instead of accepting Ammann’s training as a story of cure, we foreground Koolaart’s own agency, her position and sense of belonging within the social contexts that enabled her development — in other words, the kind of sociocultural perspective that Daniel Blackie and Alexia Moncrieff describe as central to the ambition of disability historians.⁷ Indeed, we aim to study and understand Koolaart’s life through the lenses of deaf studies, sign language studies, and disability studies.⁸

While Koolaart was regarded as disabled from the perspective of early modern ‘ability logics’ – a term coined by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood and defined as the ‘foundational cultural logics that privileged able-bodiedness’⁹ – and while the sources at first sight mainly emphasise her role as a patient-pupil, we will confront the display of her spoken language skills and the ways she was seemingly ‘paraded’ by scholars and family members with what we were able to find about her agency in daily life as a deaf woman of the higher classes in early modern Europe. We write this article as two hearing, female scholars, one signing, one non-signing. We demonstrate how Koolaart’s acquisition of speaking, reading, and writing and the way she and her skills were displayed as a scientific curiosity, is comparable to the ways in which other people with infrequent bodily characteristics were the object of empiricists’ fascination. In contrast, sources from her family context reveal how she might have experienced agency herself, due to – or despite – her speaking abilities and the public attention they garnered.¹⁰

In the first two sections of this article, we introduce Koolaart’s biography and reflect on the state of the art in deaf history, zooming in on the relationship between early modern developments in science and society and dominant ideas about deafness and on how society dealt with deaf people. In the third section, we examine Koolaart’s public image as created by Ammann and other scholars, as well as by her parents, in her early life in Haarlem and later on, followed by an analysis in the fourth section of her position within her family and the possibilities of agency within a smaller circle of friends and family, mostly later in life in Hessen. In the concluding section, a confrontation of how Koolaart was represented in both public and private contexts allows us to reflect on Koolaart’s lived experience and how this was influenced by the intersection of her class, gender, and hearing status as part of these representations, and by early modern empiricists’ interest in the senses.

Hester Koolaart was born on 3 February 1683 as the daughter of prominent Haarlem Mennonites: the wealthy textile merchant Pieter Koolaart (1656-1732) and his second wife Susanna van Lansbergen (unknown – between 1690-1693).¹¹ Van Lansbergen might have been the daughter of Gerrit van Lansbergen, one of the regents of the Mennonite orphanage.¹² Pieter Koolaart was most likely the son of Pieter Jacobsz. Colaert and Hester Pieters Ketelingh. Pieter Koolaart’s grandparents from both sides were well-off trustees of the Mennonite congregation of the Oude Vlamingen.¹³ Pieter Koolaart himself was elected deacon (voorganger) in the Mennonite congregation of the Flemish-Waterlanders at the Peuzelaarsteeg.¹⁴

Several sources state that Hester Koolaart was born deaf.¹⁵ In 1689, her father met Ammann, a young and esteemed doctor who had recently completed his dissertation in Switzerland.¹⁶ In his home country, he had already been involved in teaching deaf children. Pieter Koolaart invited him to Haarlem to teach his daughter. Ammann accepted, and from December 1690 onwards, he taught the then seven-year-old Hester.¹⁷ His training would take one and a half years.¹⁸ This was considerably longer than the two months that Ammann normally needed to teach a deaf person to speak, as he repeatedly stated in his writings.¹⁹ As his method was predominantly based on knowledge of articulatory phonetics, it is safe to assume that those two months were consecrated to learning how to read, write, and pronounce letters and words. The acquisition of a language’s complete linguistic system requires significantly more time. Ammann stated that the information included in his first book could be used to maintain and expand Hester’s skills after his training.²⁰

Born in the upper class, Koolaart led a privileged and luxurious life. She was unmarried and lived with her family throughout her life, alongside her parents, stepmother, half-sister, and her brother-in-law. After the death of her mother her father remarried the poet Elisabeth Hoofman (1664-1736), the daughter of wealthy linen merchant Joost Hoofman and Sara van Amerongen, originating from the same Mennonite elite circles in Haarlem.²¹ From the age of ten, Hester lived with her father and stepmother, and later her half-sister, as Hoofman gave birth to a daughter, Petronella Elisabeth Koolaart.²² When the financial situation of Koolaart’s family deteriorated in the 1720s, they left Haarlem, lived in Lisse for a short while, and then moved to Kassel, where her father worked in the service of the Landgrave Charles i of Hessen (Figure 1).²³ Whereas the family in Kassel seemed to have been well off at first, their situation changed when both the landgrave and Pieter Koolaart died in 1730 and 1732, respectively, and Hester Koolaart, her stepmother, and her half-sister only received half of Pieter Koolaart’s salary for the rest of her stepmother’s life. Hester Koolaart herself received an annual allowance from family members.²⁴ Once Petronella Elisabeth Koolaart married the Hessen-Kassel court printer George Harmes in 1734, the family’s situation improved, as Hester Koolaart and her stepmother lived together with the newlywed couple. In 1737, Hester Koolaart passed away in Kassel at the age of 53, one year after the death of her stepmother.

Deaf history as a field of study has received a boost from the 1980s onwards, in tandem with deaf emancipation and, more recently, the growth of the fields of deaf studies and disability history.²⁵ The primary focus of deaf history so far has been the period of institutionalised deaf education, which started from the 1760s onwards. In this period, deaf communities became visible. Indeed, in Corrie Tijsseling’s dissertation about the history of deaf institutions in the Netherlands, the starting point is that deaf people’s feelings of ‘belonging’ originated in these educational institutions.²⁶

This notion of belonging – that is the social position of deaf and hard-of-hearing people in relation to deaf worlds and hearing worlds – is one of the main themes in deaf studies. Studies on belonging and alienation in deaf schools show that language and access to communication play a crucial role.²⁷ This process is closely linked to the formation of identity, which in turn is tied to preferences regarding the use of one or more sign languages, spoken languages, and/or hybrid forms. Also relevant is the intersectionality with identities unrelated to hearing status, including class, race, and religion.²⁸ Studies on home signers who have become part of a deaf community describe how this significantly reshapes their sense of belonging.²⁹ Studies on deaf home signers who are not in contact with a community of deaf signers mostly focus on linguistic practices, but they increasingly reveal how home signers often form an active part of hearing social signing networks, thereby challenging the assumption that spoken language proficiency is a prerequisite for developing a sense of belonging within hearing communities.³⁰

In the early modern period, non-speaking had for centuries been associated with the lack of a capacity for rational thought. Deaf signers, as a consequence, were regarded as incapable of participating in central aspects of Christian theology, including salvation in the afterlife and resurrection at the end of time.³¹ The only remedy for a lack of speech due to a lack of hearing was seen to lie in the domain of miracle healings.³² From the sixteenth century onwards, however, humanist interest in the nature of language and speech led to a strong interest in the ‘curability’ of deafness by teaching deaf people to speak.³³ With the teachings of Pedro Ponce de León in sixteenth-century Spain, deaf education began to incorporate reading, writing, speaking, lip-reading, and signing.³⁴

A central theme in the history of deaf education is the so-called ‘war of methods’, which originated in this same period.³⁵ This conflict between the ‘French method’ and the ‘German method’ coincided with the institutionalisation of deaf education.³⁶ The French or manualist method was based on the use of signs modified to reflect the grammar of the spoken language. This method, which also included speech training, was developed by Abbé de l’Épée in Paris, who founded the first deaf school in Europe in 1760. It was also introduced in the first deaf school in the Netherlands in 1790.³⁷ In contrast, the German deaf educator Samuel Heinicke argued for the superiority of speech and rejected the use of signing, which is why his method became known as the German or oralist method.³⁸ Ammann’s work is appropriated by oralist educators and his opinions on deaf signing indeed seem to be quite negative, as he exclaims in his Dissertatio: ‘how inadequate and defective is the language of gestures and signs which they must use!’ Ammann also writes derogatorily about deaf people who do not speak: ‘How dull are they in general! How little do they differ from animals!’³⁹ Given the numerous reprints and translations of his work over the centuries, it is difficult to imagine that these negative qualifications did not have a significant impact on the status of deaf people and their sign languages.

As many pioneers in deaf education tutored pupils themselves, it is through their studies that we gain insight into the lives of at least some deaf people from the early modern period. As deaf education was still shrouded in mystery and secrecy, deaf pupils, particularly those who happened to develop the desired way of speaking and lipreading, were put in the spotlight as living proof of the success of their educator’s approach. The Spanish educator Manuel Ramírez de Carrión, for example, instructed the sons of De Velasco, the Constable of Castile. The language achievements of one of the sons, Luis de Velasco, were demonstrated to visitors, to their great amazement. Kenelm Digby, accompanying the Prince of Wales, witnessed and described the display of Luis de Velasco’s command of speech, and his report inspired the English physician John Bulwer to publish his well-known work on deaf education in 1648.⁴⁰ Another English pioneer in deaf education, John Wallis, primarily focused on speech therapy and also ‘exhibiting two of his pupils, Alexander Popham and Daniel Whaley, in the presence of King Charles the Second, as early as 1662’.⁴¹ Similarly, the Portuguese-French Jacob Rodrigues Pereira presented his pupil to the Académie Royale des Belles Lettres de Caen in 1746.⁴²

This way of dealing with deaf people aligns with the growing interest in rare phenomena as part of seventeenth-century empiricism and rationalism.⁴³ The pursuit of wonders and singular phenomena put observations and eyewitness reports centre stage. In the Republic of Letters, the academically interested elite of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only exchanged letters but also collected curiosities and discussed exceptional natural events.⁴⁴ Hester Koolaart was thus not an isolated case, but part of a broader phenomenon in which individuals with disabilities were exhibited to both scientific and lay audiences. Being presented as star pupils, it is rather that one-sided image of deaf people which has survived. Typically, most of the sources about deaf pupils who learned to speak, such as Koolaart, present them as unidimensional props in the ‘miracle story’ of the hearing pioneer in deaf education, uncritically copied and repeated by later authors.⁴⁵

We thus do not know much about the lived experiences of early modern deaf people. It is unclear, for example, if deaf communities in this period existed. For the recorded ‘star pupils’, such as Hester Koolaart, no evidence on this matter has survived. It is therefore an important question whether and in what ways early modern deaf people from the higher social classes felt a sense of belonging in their hearing worlds. The first step in reading the ‘miracle story’ against the grain and attempting to answer this question is to collect as many sources as possible that refer to Koolaart and analyse how she was represented, both within the Republic of Letters and beyond. In the following sections, we show that her representation was influenced by both scientific tourism and the individual agendas of the actors involved. Additionally, we argue that Koolaart must have had opportunities to develop in her hearing environments, as others from her class did.

Ammann published his works about deaf learning in various languages. In August 1692, he first published his Surdus loquens in Latin.⁴⁶ The Dutch version, Surdus loquens, dat is wis-konstige beschryvinge, op wat wijse men doof-geborene sal konnen leeren spreken, followed a month later.⁴⁷ It was reprinted in 1697, 1702, and 1717 (Figure 2). Two years after the first publication, an English translation from Latin was made and published by Daniel Foot under the title The talking deaf man.⁴⁸ Then Ammann himself published an extended version in Latin of Surdus loquens in 1700, entitled Dissertatio de loquela and reprinted in Amsterdam in 1702, 1708, 1727, and 1740.⁴⁹ A German translation of Surdus loquens was published in 1747, a French one in 1779, and another German one in 1828.⁵⁰ There were also translations in Hungarian and Italian.⁵¹

On the title page of the Dutch edition, it is added that Surdus loquens presents ‘the most mathematical description of the way one can teach [those] born deaf to speak. […] Everything leaning on undisputable grounds and experience’.⁵² These additions serve to emphasise the scientific nature of the teaching method. The book consists of three chapters: the first focuses on the voice, the second on the letters, and the third presents concrete ways to apply the insights from the first two chapters to teach deaf youngsters to speak, write, and understand people who speak to them. Koolaart figures in Ammann’s works in several places, but it is especially in this third chapter that he frequently refers to his experiences with her as his pupil. For example, he describes how initially she would only be able to pronounce the word papa (‘daddy’), despite the ‘thousands of times’ her father tried teaching her how to say mama (‘mummy’). Ammann recounts how, with his help, Koolaart quickly learned to pronounce mama, and after two months of intense training, had learned to speak and lipread. These references to a concrete and successful case serve to convince his readers of the effectiveness of his method, and also to reinforce a sense of amazement.

In the preface to the Dutch version of Surdus loquens, Ammann mentions four other pupils from Amsterdam and Schaffhausen (Switzerland). In the Dissertatio de loquela, he states: ‘Within the space of two months, I have taught many mutes both to read and to pronounce a great number of words’.⁵³ Other than Koolaart, his pupils are only discussed in case of a particular characteristic.⁵⁴ This is likely related to the fact that Ammann dedicated his book to Pieter Koolaart, who had asked him to publish it and paid for its publication.⁵⁵ Hester Koolaart herself is rarely mentioned by name, she is primarily referred to as the gifted daughter of Ammann’s friend and patron.⁵⁶ In the extensive dedication in the Latin edition, Ammann writes that he received many favours from Pieter Koolaart, who offered him housing during the training.⁵⁷ Most of this text is devoted to the amazement Pieter Koolaart felt, just like many others, about the fact that Ammann succeeded in making a deaf person speak. Referring to the father’s change of beliefs is a rhetorically effective strategy, as it acknowledges the doubts of unconvinced readers and may lead them to anticipate a surprising perspective. Indeed, staging Hester Koolaart in the book is important for its credibility. At the beginning of the third chapter, Ammann mentions how her miraculous development was already observed by many eyewitnesses, including inhabitants of ‘a great part of Holland, and universally almost to the whole City of Harlem’, and readers who still doubt the method are invited to come and see for themselves.⁵⁸

The story of Koolaart’s acquisition of speaking skills seems to have been regarded as quite spectacular, and Ammann’s invitation to come and see for yourself was followed by many people from the Low Countries and abroad. As was common practice at the time, many scientific visitors recorded their eyewitness accounts either in publications or in letters to other scientists, some of which were later published. All in all, we found approximately ten eyewitness reports, mostly from scholars of varying fame.⁵⁹ The latter include, for example, intimates of the family such as the Haarlem physician Antonius van Dale,⁶⁰ but also the Russian Tzar Peter the Great, who saw Koolaart in 1697 at Ammann’s home in Amsterdam.⁶¹ That these meetings also occurred before the publication of the book is not only stated by Ammann himself, but is also evidenced by a letter from another family friend, Philippus van Limborch. He shared his amazement with John Locke in May 1691 in a letter with an extensive description of Koolaart’s case, stating that ‘(e)veryone is astonished when they see the girl, and many come every day from other towns to this gentleman’s house to see her’.⁶² Ammann thus did not exaggerate when he stated that many people in Holland had witnessed the success of his method. What his phrasing hides, however, is that the young Koolaart was called on time and again to demonstrate her speaking abilities.

Creating a positive public image of his pupil in the book and in the demonstration sessions was probably not only part of Ammann’s own reputation management but also of his patron’s. For Pieter Koolaart, the profiling of his daughter as Ammann’s successful pupil was advantageous in various ways: he became known as the father of an intellectually gifted child, and as someone who put money and efforts into promoting and sharing important and innovative scientific knowledge. An example of the importance of his daughter’s success story to Koolaart’s reputation is that in 1695, a family friend, Pieter Rabus, dedicated an issue of his journal Boekzaal van Europe to him and his wife, and also, unlike Amman, to ‘their very ingenious daughter miss Hester Koolaert’.⁶³ Rabus shows his wonder over the fact that someone born deaf was able to be such a renowned person in the world of art and learning, and he presents this fact as an argument for a strong belief in the power of the mind: ‘art and labour by a healthy intellect can do more than is commonly known in the world’.⁶⁴

Presumably, the organisation of the demonstration sessions in which Koolaart showed her speaking and literacy abilities was a collaborative effort of Ammann and her father. Ammann must have been the one leading the demonstrations when he trained Koolaart and lived in her family’s house. For the period thereafter, the demonstrations were likely more of a family affair. The demonstration that was held for Peter the Great, years after Ammann had left Haarlem, was obviously an exceptional event for which the teacher must have gladly stepped back into his old role. It is also the only time it is explicitly mentioned that Koolaart was invited to leave her house and give the demonstration in another place.

Van Limborch’s lengthy eyewitness account of a demonstration session provides a clear picture of the procedure for these sessions. When he and his wife visited the Koolaart family, Hester was brought in and spoke to them, telling them how pleased she was with their visit. Then, Van Limborch wrote his name on a sheet of paper, which she read aloud. She was also given a card containing writing in Italic and Roman script, which she read out loud. She also read Arabic numbers. She recited the Lord’s Prayer, and she was able to lipread the words pronounced by her father. Van Limborch wrote: ‘if there was anything she did not quite follow, she signed to her father to write it down, and then she read it’.⁶⁵ At leave-taking, Hester said goodbye to Van Limborch and his wife, pronouncing their names, ‘which had cleaved to her memory after reading them only twice’.⁶⁶ Hester’s deaf voice and accent were not noted by Van Limborch, but they were by Frederick Dekkers, a professor of medicine at Leiden University. Dekkers noted that ‘her voice was hoarse and slow, but understandable for everyone’.⁶⁷ According to Van Limborch’s description, the demonstration had evolved into a routine practice, with recurring elements. The speech skills Koolaart demonstrated were familiar or predictable verbal performances, such as reading or saying out loud the name of the visitor, and citing the Lord’s Prayer. Indeed, other visitors mention these elements as well, and it is important to recognise that the demonstrations were well-prepared, staged performances rather than natural communication settings in which Koolaart would arguably have had more agency.

The fact that in 1697 Ammann invited the then fourteen-year-old Koolaart for a demonstration for the Russian tzar, despite a lapse of seven years during which he (according to his own writing) had instructed ‘many’ other deaf pupils, might be related to her celebrity within the international Republic of Letters. At the same time, it might have also been motivated by the fact that Koolaart had continued to develop her language skills, expanding into other languages as well. Ammann had stated that he wanted her to educate herself further after he finished his training. He wrote, ‘that there’s good hope that she, once she becomes a young adult, will be able to get along with others just like everyone else.’⁶⁸ We do not know if his assumption would materialise, but we do know Koolaart did not stop training her language skills. In the demonstrations, the focus was clearly on speech production, but visitors also positively commented on her reading and writing skills. In 1693, Hoofman’s teacher and friend of the family Jacob Storm stated that the then ten-year-old Koolaart knew how to read and write.⁶⁹ In 1696, Hoofman wrote to befriended scholar Theodorus van Almeloveen that Koolaart understood simple Latin and would love to learn some new words in Hebrew from him.⁷⁰ The Danish medicine student Jacob Winslow, who visited Koolaart in 1698, wrote in his autobiography that she spoke a bit of Latin and French too.⁷¹ As such, the miracle story of the speaking deaf girl was made even more miraculous.

Because of her upbringing in an intellectual and higher class family, it is likely these are realistic descriptions of Koolaart’s language learning. It is safe to assume that Hoofman, in her role as the mother of the household, was involved in Hester’s further training from the moment she married Pieter Koolaart in 1693.⁷² This was a year after Ammann’s publication, so Hoofman likely continued Koolaart’s training after Ammann left. It is also possible that Hoofman had already been involved in Koolaart’s education as a friend of the family, since they belonged to the same Mennonite circle, or even that she already knew Ammann through her intellectual network before her marriage. Moreover, Hoofman’s learning and interest in the sciences must have made her both capable and motivated to continue Ammann’s project.⁷³ As is evident from her letter to Van Almeloveen, Hoofman took an active interest in expanding Koolaart’s linguistic knowledge by sharing her stepdaughter’s desire to learn Hebrew.

Moreover, it seemed to be expected of Hoofman to teach Koolaart, as is evidenced by, for example, the poem Hoofman’s own teacher, Storm, wrote on the occasion of her marriage with Pieter Koolaart. According to the poem, he would not be surprised if Koolaart would even learn Greek and Latin, now that she would be educated by Hoofman:

Storm thus implies that Koolaart participated in her stepmother’s intellectual activities. Hoofman herself would later reinforce this picture. Just like her husband, she contributed to the family’s continued association with the success story of her stepdaughter.

Hoofman demonstrated her admiration for Ammann by composing a lengthy poem filled with praise on the occasion of his birthday in 1694.⁷⁵ In this poem, she strongly reinforces the framing of his method as miraculous. She leaves no metaphor untouched to underscore the remarkable fact that he enabled deaf people to speak. Whereas she extensively praises him in general, the last strophe is dedicated to the ‘small Hester’, his ‘big test piece’. She paints the orgel (‘musical organ’) that Ammann had created in Koolaart’s gorgel (‘gorge’) as ‘the great proof of his art’. She ends the poem by saying that this newly created organ wishes him that his honorable name will come ‘humming from the mouths of a thousand mutes’, thus giving Koolaart a performative role in the poem as well.

Since no contemporary print publication survives, we do not know whether the anniversary poem was read by anyone other than Ammann himself.⁷⁶ We do know this was the case for another poem praising Ammann that was dedicated to the Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel. Koolaart’s training turns out to be a set piece in Hoofman’s solicitations for patronage at the Hessen-Kassel court.⁷⁷ In the first poem Hoofman wrote for her future patron, shortly before she moved to Kassel, she introduces herself and her daughters to the Landgrave (Figure 3).⁷⁸ As becomes evident from the poem, it accompanied a gift: Ammann’s Surdus loquens, the book dedicated to her husband. It is a meaningful present for a ruler characterised in the poem as someone who ‘supports and favours science, and all valuable arts, perseveringly’.⁷⁹ The introduction of Koolaart is linked directly to the book:

Hoofman recommends her family to the Landgrave, as lovers of science and the arts. The association with Ammann and his method substantiates this, even more than twenty years after his training of Koolaart. Hoofman’s choice of this book as her first gift to the Landgrave underscores the importance of Koolaart’s story in shaping how Hoofman presented herself and her family to the outside world.

From the sources discussed so far, we can infer that Koolaart was of considerable importance to both Ammann and her parents in their public image building and networking activities. In this public image, Hester is presented as a gifted pupil who is grateful for the fact that she has been taught to speak, lipread, read, and write. Still, we know nothing about her own experiences and daily life, except that she must have been quite busy giving demonstrations. From the (international) visitors’ accounts, we know Koolaart met many visitors. Most probably, Ammann and/or her father were always with her to discuss her performance with the guests. We know very little about her direct interactions with the audience, except, for example, that she handed Ammann’s book to a visitor.⁸¹

It is hard to say how she experienced all this. Did she like the attention, or did she feel uncomfortable? Was she proud of herself? To what extent was she consulted when people came to see her? Was she able and allowed to interact spontaneously with visitors? Unfortunately, we do not have sufficient sources to answer these questions with certainty. Still, we do have some sources that shed light on her life within the family circle: letters written by her half-sister long after her death, in 1747, letters and poems written by her stepmother during her life, and one poem published under her name, but originally written by Joost van den Vondel. All these sources portray her as an agentive figure within the household and beyond, actively participating in housework and intellectual activities. Moreover, the previously discussed sources, especially the eyewitness reports of the demonstrations, show how Koolaart took agency over her own means of communication.

In the letters written after Koolaart’s death, her half-sister Petronella Elisabeth mentions Koolaart’s annual allowance of 200 guilders.⁸² This amount of money was not significant, but in times of financial uncertainty, especially after Pieter Koolaart died in 1732, it must have been a welcome fixed income for the family. Also, on a personal level, Koolaart is presented as being important to her half-sister and her stepmother. In a letter sent to their former pastor in Haarlem, the doctor and poet Jacobus van Zanten, Petronella Elisabeth tells him how their lives unfolded in Kassel:⁸³ ‘We kept my sister with us, until god took her away, too, [in] 1737, at the age of 53 years. Again, a lot of help and company was lost, as I was often ailing.’⁸⁴ The phrasing, ‘we kept my sister with us’, does not imply much agency on the part of Koolaart. The last sentence, however, suggests that the situation may have been different in at least some ways, as Koolaart helped the sickly Petronella Elisabeth.

In Hoofman’s correspondence with the aforementioned Van Almeloveen, it appears that Koolaart was also regarded as agentive by people outside the household.⁸⁵ He included Koolaart in conventional phrases, such as a request to Hoofman to greet both her parents and her daughters on behalf of him. In some letters from 1701, Hoofman kept Van Almeloveen updated about the illness and recovery of her mother, her husband, and her stepdaughter.⁸⁶ It also appears from this correspondence that Koolaart herself communicated with Van Almeloveen and other learned men on various occasions. For example, she was said to be looking forward to seeing Van Almeloveen again. After a visit, Hoofman promised him that Koolaart would quickly return a small basket he had brought them earlier.⁸⁷ There is also a letter in which Hoofman told Van Almeloveen how unfortunate it was that she was not at home herself when the scholar Henricus Christianus Henninius from Duisburg visited the family. Luckily, she stated, her husband and daughter had been home and able to receive him.⁸⁸ As Petronella Elisabeth was only three or four at the time, this daughter must have been the fifteen-year-old Hester.

Apart from these letters, there are also poems in which Koolaart is mentioned. This suggests she was involved in one of the everyday pastime activities for women of her class and, in particular, her stepmother – reading and writing poetry.⁸⁹ Hoofman wrote two birthday poems for her, both in 1716 and in 1724, and she wrote a birthday poem for her mother-in-law on behalf of Hester and Petronella Elisabeth in 1704.⁹⁰ Both poems for Koolaart, written on the occasion of her 33^rd and 41^st birthdays, are short and conventional, congratulating her and wishing that God will allow her to live in virtue and peace, fresh, healthy and full of cheerfulness (Figure 4). The 1724 poem describes how Koolaart has invited many friends to eat cake. The party is presented as more than a family occasion, and Koolaart is the one who takes the lead. Hoofman’s perspective is that of a guest at the party. Although Koolaart was still living with her family, this is precisely what one would expect on the occasion of a 41^st birthday.

In 1716, Hoofman also wrote a birthday poem for her biological daughter Petronella Elisabeth.⁹¹ It is much longer and less conventional than the poems for Koolaart. Could this difference in length and tone be related to Koolaart’s deafness? We do not know, but it is most probable that it was not the only reason. Although Hoofman did refer to Koolaart as her daughter, in the opening lines of the poem for Petronella Elisabeth, Hoofman writes that the latter is her ‘sole pledge’, which signifies a difference between her relationship with her stepdaughter, on the one hand, and that with her daugher, on the other.⁹² Another meaningful difference is age. The poem for Petronella Elisabeth was evidently part of her (religious) education, as it also contains several lessons considered important for a young maiden who would later marry and, as such, be responsible for the continuation of the family line. Petronella turned 20, whereas Koolaart turned 33 in the same year. The fact that Hoofman apparently did not think it was necessary to similarly educate Koolaart in her birthday poem of that same year can be explained by this difference in age, even though 33 was, in principle, not too old to get married. It is therefore also possible that she expected Koolaart not to marry, but to stay within the household for the rest of her life.

Notwithstanding these observations, the two birthday poems also show Hoofman presented Koolaart as one of her daughters. They celebrated her birthday together, as appears from the last lines of the 1724 poem, where all family members are encouraged to sing Koolaart a birthday song, apparently without adapting this family tradition to her deafness. Hoofman’s 1704 poem for her daughters’ grandmother presents Koolaart as an equal to her sister Petronella Elisabeth, as both are mentioned in its title as the granddaughters on behalf of whom the poem is written.⁹³ As the poem was written in 1704, Petronella Elisabeth must have been 9 or 10 years old, while Hester was aged 21. For both of them, participating in the creation of the poem must have been possible; however, the title suggests that Hoofman wrote the poem for them. The poem is written in first-person plural and addresses the grandmother in the polite form of the second-person singular. It is written from the family’s country home in Lisse, seemingly to apologise for their absence in Haarlem on that festive day. At the end, it mentions how, ‘happily chattering, with countless echoes, they will thank God’s goodness’ and ‘shout; may grandma live a long life!’⁹⁴ It is a conventional ending, but meaningful given Koolaart’s deafness. Hoofman here presents Koolaart’s participation in something as shouting birthday wishes as a natural matter of fact. As was the case in mentioning the singing of a birthday song for Koolaart, she was presented as fully participating in family life. We can, of course, only speculate whether she really did, and we do not know whether Hoofman discussed the poem with her daughters or if they even wrote it together. Still, the poem must have been regarded by contemporaries as the result of a family activity in which Koolaart and her much younger stepsister both had some form of agency.

The most intriguing example of Koolaart’s presentation as an agentive family member is a poem with her name in the collection of wedding poems published on the occasion of her sister’s wedding in 1734. It is a small collection, including poems by Elisabeth Hoofman and friends and colleagues of the groom, the Kassel court printer.⁹⁵ The second poem in the collection is presented as written by Hester Koolaart (Figure 5).⁹⁶ Surprisingly, however, this text was in fact written by Joost van den Vondel, the most renowned Dutch poet of the seventeenth century. Vondel, who died long before, had written the poem on the occasion of a 1658 wedding in Hoorn, and it was published that same year in a popular poetry collection called Apollos harp.⁹⁷ Of course, we do not know whether Koolaart had selected and adapted the poem herself or in collaboration, or that Hoofman did it for her, but it was presented as Koolaart’s own work.

The poem adheres to the conventions of the genre, which originate in the classical tradition.⁹⁸ Moreover, as the 1658 wedding for which Vondel composed the poem was celebrated shortly after the death of one of the couple’s parents, it perfectly fitted in with the occasion of Petronella Elisabeth’s marriage. The conventional element of the bride’s reluctance to marry in this poem is connected to her grief over the loss of her father (in Vondel’s original poem the mother) and in the end, the wedding is presented as a consolation: ‘What was lost with Father, / you win with the groom’.⁹⁹ In this way, the poem echoes Hoofman’s poem, which also refers to the death of Pieter Koolaart. As the poem fitted the occasion so well, the only changes made were replacements of names, places, and dates, which sometimes, because of rhyme, led to another choice of words, but the meaning stayed the same.¹⁰⁰

The poem elaborates extensively on imagery drawn from nature. It is striking that in these metaphors, sound plays an important role. For example, this is how the poem starts:

In describing how the skylark’s chirping makes every living creature rhyme, Koolaart implies she herself is encouraged to write this poem by the skylark’s singing as well. Further on, the poem inspires the audience to listen carefully in order to observe how all animals mate at this time of year. In the description of the groom’s ‘conquest’ of the bride, the skylark retakes the lead: it is its chirping that encourages the groom to go and see Petronella Elisabeth. The inclusion of this poem presents Hester Koolaart – whether through her own agency or that of her stepmother – not only as participating in intellectual activities within the extended circle of family and friends, but also, emphatically, as being part of the world of the hearing.

Since it was an occasional publication intended for the German guests at the Kassel wedding, the likelihood that anyone would notice the poem’s indebtedness to Vondel’s original was small; however, it is also possible that it was commonly acknowledged that Koolaart had not written the poem herself. However it may be, the inclusion of Koolaart in the collection of poetry on the occasion of her sister’s wedding is a case in point for her agency in an intellectually oriented family and the larger, upper-class circles to which they belonged. If we were to be more skeptical, we could also regard the poem as part of her stepmother’s ongoing project of presenting her as such, since Hoofman, as the mother of the bride and the first author of the collection, must have had a say in the inclusion of Koolaart’s poem. In this case, however, it is impossible to pinpoint the precise balance between the agency Koolaart might have perceived and the representation of said agency.

Nevertheless, the eyewitness reports of the demonstrations of her skills clearly show that Koolaart was agentive in her means of communication. Van Limborch’s description, for example, not only shows how the demonstration was a well-prepared performance, but also enables us to distill some understanding of Koolaart’s language practices before and after Ammann’s instruction, including her signing. Deaf people growing up and living with their hearing family members outside a context of deaf education commonly use a form of home signing.¹⁰² Living in a stable communicative environment throughout a deaf person’s life may lead to considerable lexical expansion and complexification of home signing. This was likely to be the case for Koolaart too, who spent her entire life in the same household. Indeed, Van Limborch, who had known Koolaart from early infancy, notes that ‘she understood and expressed herself entirely by nods and gestures, and in this she showed considerable adroitness.’¹⁰³ Moreover, the use of home signs did not end with Ammann’s training. Koolaart and her father appear to have maintained at least some form of manual communication. Van Limborch describes how, during a demonstration, Koolaart was cued by ‘a certain sign from her father, which she understood’, upon which she uttered ‘I am deaf, but I am not dumb’.¹⁰⁴

Van Limborch furthermore notes Koolaart’s lipreading skills: ‘She made out words from the movement of her father’s mouth.’¹⁰⁵ Also, Van Dale, who retained an interest in Koolaart’s ‘case’ and frequently corresponded with their shared acquaintance Van Almeloveen about the Koolaart family, mentions her lipreading abilities in an exaggerated account of her skills, stating that she could lipread even in the dark.¹⁰⁶ In a footnote to his 1693 wedding poem, Storm mentions that deaf-born Koolaart, through Ammann’s training, ‘already contrives sufficiently by means of speech’.¹⁰⁷ This phrasing suggests that she did not rely on speaking exclusively, or even predominantly, and that she continued to sign alongside speaking. Indeed, there are indications that other deaf people who learned to speak through formal training did not rely on speaking in their adult lives. For example, Alexander Popham, a student of John Wallis, was referred to as non-speaking in a document made later in his life.¹⁰⁸ Similarly, D’Azy d’Etavigny, a pupil of Jacob Rodrigues Pereira in France, stopped using speech later in life, relying on signing and writing.¹⁰⁹ Whereas Koolaart became famous as a ‘speaking deaf’ and Ammann’s star pupil, she had developed an effective form of signing, both before and during her training, which she continued to use after she had learnt to speak.

As a deaf woman at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, Hester Koolaart lived a rather eventful life. As a deaf signer who learned to speak, read, and write through Ammann’s training, she became an object of international scientific curiosity, showcasing her various language skills in staged performances. From an empiricist’s viewpoint, she was the living refutation of the medieval understanding that muteness in deaf people could only be cured by godly intervention. The connections that her parents had in the Republic of Letters probably contributed to this effect, as did her father’s financial support to publish Ammann’s book. Hoofman further fostered the success story of her stepdaughter’s developing literacy by involving her in her writings and presenting her as a (co-)author on festive family occasions. After the family moved to Kassel, Hoofman strategically used Koolaart’s story in her solicitation of patronage.

In this article, we have analysed the ways Hester Koolaart was paraded to interested scholarly audiences, and have contrasted the somewhat passive image of her that arises from these practices with sources revealing glimpses of her agency in everyday life. Studies on deaf people involved in early deaf education suggest that the displaying of Koolaart and her skills was not unique, as appears from various examples we mentioned. In her case, however, we can bring together sources that document her presence in the Republic of Letters with sources related to her position within the family and household. Some of the sources discussed here have been newly discovered by us, but most were already known. Up until now, however, they had only appeared in scattered studies touching on topics as diverse as the Republic of Letters, deaf education, or Dutch poetry. Koolaart has never been the focus of these studies. Examining cases such as Koolaart’s in detail is necessary, given the lack of awareness and documentation of deaf people during the period before the institutionalisation of deaf education.

Having done so for Hester Koolaart, we can now attempt to understand what our findings imply about her social position and her sense of belonging, as a deaf person in a largely hearing context. Similar to probably all of the deaf painters introduced earlier, Koolaart grew up as a signer and continued to sign throughout her life. Like for most deaf artists, there is no direct evidence that she was in regular contact with other deaf signers. Johannes Thopas was active in Haarlem for a short time, but given his advanced age and their difference in religion, it is unlikely that they knew each other. In assessing the likelihood of Koolaart having had contact with other deaf signers, it is essential to recognise that she led an economically privileged yet sheltered life, living in the household of her parents and sister and being financially supported by her cousins throughout her life. For Koolaart, being literate and able to speak seems to have contributed to her status as an academic curiosity rather than to the increase of her social mobility. She was regarded as exceptional, not because she was deaf, but mostly because she had learnt to speak. It must have been despite her fame that she had opportunities to feel a sense of belonging within the context of her hearing family.

The life trajectories of deaf individuals in the Dutch Republic varied significantly, depending on local laws, their gender, class, socio-economic position, and capacities, as well as on their contacts with other deaf people and their exposure to signing and speaking. Hopefully, the current trend among historians to study deaf people and deafness, including those from the period before the institutionalisation of deaf education, will make more biographies available, enabling us to broaden our understanding of deaf networks and contacts, as well as the agency and senses of belonging of deaf people in early modern Europe.