Composing The Classroom Imagining The Medieval English Grammar School Thesis Kate Fedewa by Kate Fedewa instant download after payment.

"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.