and other prominent philosophers believed that deafness was intrinsically connected to mutism and lack of intelligence, which was codified in Roman law; therefore they were considered incapable of being educated. When John of Beverley, Bishop of York, taught a deaf person to speak in 685 AD, it was deemed a miracle, and he was later canonized. European education for the deaf is not recorded until the 16th century, when Pedro Ponce de León began tutoring deaf children of wealthy patrons — in some places, literacy was a requirement for legal recognition as an heir. The first book on deaf education, published in 1620 by Juan Pablo Bonet in Madrid, included a detailed account of the use of a manual alphabet to teach deaf students to read and speak. It is considered the first modern treatise on phonetics and speech therapy, setting out a method of oral education for deaf children. In Britain, Thomas Braidwood founded the first school for the deaf in the late 1700s. He was secretive about his teaching methods but probably used sign language, finger spelling and lip reading. l'Abbé Charles Michel de l'Épée started the first school for deaf children in Paris, in 1755. Laurent Clerc was arguably the most famous graduate of L'Épee's school; Clerc went to the United States with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to found the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817. In France and the United States, sign language, or "manualism" was initially the favored communication method for education of deaf students, firmly supported by Clerc and therefore Gallaudet. In England and Germany oralism was considered to be superior - sign language was thought to be a mere collection of gestures, and a barrier between deaf people and hearing society. In 1880, the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf (ICED) met in Milan with 164 educators attending (only one of them being deaf). At this meeting they passed a resolution removing the use of sign language from deaf education, and establishing the solely oralist classroom as standard. In line with this philosophy, manually coded languages have been created and used for education instead of sign language, such as Signing Exact English. The debate between oralism and manualism remained active after Milan. In the late 20th century educators and researchers began to understand the importance of sign language to language acquisition. In 1960 when the linguist William Stokoe