The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature Series

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.

Irina Dumitrescu is Junior 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 been reprinted in Best American Essays 2016.