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Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks.
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T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F E D U C AT I O N I N A N G L O - S A XO N L I T E R AT U R E Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks. Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. She is the editor of Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (2016). Her scholarship has been published in journals such as PMLA, Exemplaria, The Chaucer Review, Anglia, postmedieval, Forum for Modern Language Studies, and in various international collections. Her literary essays have appeared in the Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Atlantic, and Longreads, and have been reprinted in Best American Essays 2016 and Best Food Writing 2017. CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE General Editor Alastair Minnis, Yale University Editorial Board Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Cambridge Christopher C. Baswell, Barnard College and Columbia University John Burrow, University of Bristol Mary Carruthers, New York University Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania Roberta Frank, Yale University Simon Gaunt, King’s College, London Steven Kruger, City University of New York Nigel Palmer, University of Oxford Winthrop Wetherbee, Cornell University Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University This series of critical books seeks to cover the whole area of literature written in the major medieval languages – the main European vernaculars, and medieval Latin and Greek – during the period c.1100–1500. Its chief aim is to publish and stimulate fresh scholarship and criticism on medieval literature, special emphasis being placed on understanding major works of poetry, prose, and drama in relation to the contemporary culture and learning which fostered them. Recent titles in the series Lee Manion Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature Daniel Wakelin Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375–1510 Jon Whitman (ed.) Romance and History: Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period Virginie Greene Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (