The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature

Reveals the rich emotional experience of teaching and learning as revealed in Anglo-Saxon literature.

Irina Dumitrescu (Author)

9781108403368, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 November 2020

254 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 1.5 cm, 0.385 kg

'The Experience of Education is elegantly written and rigorously researched. Its new takes on much-studied texts will revitalize scholarly discussions … No doubt those studying these individual works, their respective genres, Old English and Latin literature, educational history, or monastic culture will have much to learn about learning from Dumitrescu's monograph.' Laura Saetveit Miles, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen

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.

Introduction
1. Letters: Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People
2. Prayer: Solomon and Saturn I
3. Violence: Ælfric Bata's colloquies
4. Recollection: Andreas
5. Desire: the life of St Mary of Egypt
Conclusion: the ends of teaching.

Subject Areas: Educational: literature in languages other than English [YQFL], Educational: English literature [YQE], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]