Writing Speechlessness: Thomas Traherne’s Fetal Poetics

In “Dumnesse,” the seventeenth-century poet and theologian Thomas Traherne takes infancy—in both its biological and etymological valences as early human life and the inability to speak (from the Latin, infāntia)—as the ideal ground of spiritual knowledge. This talk situates Traherne’s poem among the systematic, experimental language projects of his time—John Wilkins’s plan for a universal written character, and John Wallis’s pedagogies in sign language and mathematics—that invested in the possibilities of non-phonetic writing. These prescient imaginings about the untapped potential of speechlessness are not merely quixotic fantasies of immediacy but early revelations about the paradoxes of disembodied communication.