CFP: Early Medieval Education
ICMS, Kalamazoo 9-12 May 2019
Scenes of instruction and learning fill early medieval literature and art–Boethius at Philosophia’s knees, Alcuin and Charlemagne discussing rhetoric, Lioba recalling Eadburga’s poetic instruction. Education, as Irina Dumitrescu pointed out in her monograph, Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2018), is the common factor shared by the scribes, authors, and other producers of the medieval texts remaining to us. What was early medieval education and how did those students and teachers experience, remember, and act on their learning? This panel will explore the role of early medieval education as a driving force behind literary, intellectual, and cultural production and exchange. This panel welcomes scholarship from across medieval studies disciplines and geographical foci. It aims to engage global, theoretical, and material methodologies, to discover both broad and localized instances and impacts of early medieval education. Diverse approaches, including historical, art historical, archaeological, literary, and musicological, are welcome. The following are some examples of topics that papers in this session might address:
- Early medieval pedagogies: the evidence in art, glosses, correspondence, and material remains
- Methods of scriptural interpretation: how was exegesis learned and taught?
- Learning and materiality: the intellectual alongside the embodied
- Learning communities and networks across time and place
- Teacher-student relationships and early medieval classrooms
Organizers: Sophia D’Ignazio (Cornell University) and Ryan Lawrence (Cornell University)
Please send any queries and proposals (250 words) for 20-minute papers to: Sophia D’Ignazio, sd769@cornell.edu, by September 15, 2018.
