Bulwer's first work was Chirologia...Chironomia and this work was seprated into two parts. The first section, Chirologia, simply tried to survey and list all movements of the hands and fingers that expressed emotion externally. For example, a person shaking their fist in anger or a person praying with their hands together and fingers pointing up towards heaven. This section simply listed and tried to describe these nonverbal communicators. The second section of Bulwer's first book, Chirnomia is much more important to rhetoric and is widely recognized as Bulwer's best work. This section is more of a teaching by Bulwer on how to effectively use your body while giving a speech. To do this he broke the teachings into four different parts. The first dealing with how to use the arms and hands to express gross emotion. An example would be shaking your fist to show anger. The second part showed how to manage your fingers during a speech. He talked about using your fingers to show contrary ideas and to use them to numbedr arguments. The third section dealt with decorum and the do's and don'ts of of how to use your body in a speech. For example he talked about how not flail your arms around or not to use your elbows. The last section was more general and simply talked about timing and variety and how the should be applied to gestures during a speech.
His second volume was called the Pathomyotomia and dealt with the head. Buwler broke the head down into ten different parts to better describe the different nonverbal messages that can be given off by the head. These ten parts were the head itself, face, forehead, eye-lids, eye, ears, nose, cheeks, lips and mouth, and finally the tongue. In this volume he also discussed some of the emotions that can be expressed with the different parts of the head. An example of this would be the wrinkling of the nose to show dislike for something.
Philocuphus was Bulwer's third volume and arguable the most interesting of his works. This volume was strictly written as an educational tool for deaf mutes and dealt with the nature of voice and pronunciation. This work contained fifteen chapters and in those chapters is a piece of work that is often over looked. This work is Buwler's own hand alphabet for the deaf. This would have made him the first develop such an alphabet. In this work Bulwer also derives a theory were a deaf person could hear through vibrations in the teeth traveling up the spine to the brain.
It is the author of the article's opinion that John Bulwer has not received enough credit from modern day scholars for his works and his contributions to rhetoric. To defend this point Mr. Cleary points to the fact that Bulwer was the first emphasis gestures in public speaking and the first to use pictures to demonstrate these gestures. Mr. Cleary simply feels that John Bulwer wanted to expand peoples knowledge and the importance of communication.
Chuck Miller, cwm8320@uncwil.edu