Composing the classroom : imagining the medieval English grammar school [thesis]

Description

"Composing the Classroom" explores the means by which and purposes for which Latin literacy was acquired and represented in medieval England as a way of better understanding the intersection between pedagogical practice and literary production in the period. Following the suggestion of Andrew Townsend that scholars must still "interrogate the self-declared identity of many Latin texts" in order to fully understand the development of Latinate culture, especially within larger vernacular contexts, I analyze Latin pedagogical materials in order to identify the subject position imagined for the schoolboy in medieval periods noted for their heightened use of English as a language of prestige. In Chapter One, I suggest that the eleventh-century monastic schoolboy was trained to be bilingual, but that his acquisition of Latin required a displacement of English as his primary language for Latin. The fifteenth-century schoolboy, as I argue in Chapter Two, utilized a translingual approach to grammar that allowed him to act as a linguistic negotiator in a variety of social contexts. By considering the ways in which memories of pedagogic practices are activated in vernacular writing in my third and forth chapters, I explore how Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, writers who were themselves products of a grammar school education, employed reading and composition exercises toward a grammatical nostalgia that informed their interpretations of the world beyond the classroom. My dissertation redefines ideas of literacy acquisition in the period from Aelfric to Caxton, describing a productive cycle in which reader, instructor, author, text, and reading praxis act on each other within the literal and literary schoolroom.