Irina Dumitrescu's The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature examines "scenes of instruction" in Old English and Anglo-Latin texts to draw a complex portrait of the emotions bound up in acts of teaching and learning during the Anglo-Saxon period (13). The book is, as the word "literature" in the title suggests, primarily a work of literary criticism: each of the book's five chapters engages a particular literary text--Bede'sEcclesiastical History, Solomon and Saturn I, Ælfric Bata's Colloquies, Andreas, and The Life of St. Mary of Egypt--and Dumitrescu's introduction names New Criticism and New Formalism as key influences on her approach (2-4). The Experience of Educationnonetheless has an historical slant, as Dumitrescu finds in her chosen sources a nuanced understanding of educational experience "consistent with the theories of learning that Anglo-Saxons inherited and reflected in their own works" (13). In attending to the historical ramifications of her literary analysis, Dumitrescu aligns herself with modern critics who see literary critical methodologies as powerful tools for writing cultural and intellectual history. The highly specific aim of the project, coupled with its exciting and unusual selection of texts, suggests an ideal reader already conversant in the relevant contexts: a scholar interested in early English education, and sufficiently well read to know more or less where Solomon and Saturn I and Andreas fit into the literary tradition. For such an audience, The Experience of Education is well worth reading in its entirety, as Dumitrescu's erudite and appealing style adds to the pleasure occasioned by her meticulous close readings. Cambridge University Press has done an excellent job with the volume as well: there is, to my knowledge, only one typographical error in the book (on p. 151), the design is excellent, and the bibliography, notes and index make the volume easy to navigate.
Dumitrescu's introduction declares her interest in Old English and Anglo-Latin literature's tendency to dwell on the complex connection between education and emotion. Anglo-Saxon authors, Dumitrescu argues, make reference in their writing to a complex of emotional experience that supported, and sometimes got in the way of, education: "in their various permutations and combinations, these emotions provoke, enable, and compel learning. They also occasionally serve to upset it" (13). While the introduction explains that motivating interest well, it is less clear on the book's precise contribution, choosing to emphasize what must remain obscure over what the book will illuminate: "what I hope to show in this book is how knotty [the Anglo-Saxons'] perspective on learning was, and how cryptic--and witty--they could be when communicating their thoughts" (16). This is, I think, an understatement: what the book does, and does successfully, is show how the texts under investigation adapted and interrogated a Christian idea of pedagogically useful suffering--with all its attendant emotional complications--that was part of their inheritance from Late Antique literature and culture. The introduction gestures towards that claim on p. 13, but it deserves higher billing.
The subsequent chapters of Dumitrescu's book examine, one by one, the five texts named above. Chapter one, "Letters: Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People," focuses on John of Beverly's healing of a mute youth in book five of the HE, and argues that Bede presents rudimentary grammatical education as a means of physical, social and spiritual emancipation--an exercise in "liberation philology," to borrow one of Dumitrescu's own coinages. Dumitrescu's argument depends to a degree on her supposition that John of Beverly was teaching the boy the English alphabet, which is a reasonable, but not a certain, reading. Bede's description of the miracle (cited by Dumitrescu on p. 19) is too short to support a definitive conclusion one way or the other, but the similarity of the episode to the pedagogical method of Donatus and other Latin grammatical texts suggests at least the possibility that John of Beverly was teaching the boy Latin. Dumitrescu is nevertheless right to point out that the boy refuses a position in John's household after the miracle took place, thereby appropriating John's teaching for a non-ecclesiastical milieu. She also does the reader a service in considering how, at the elementary level of sound and letter, Latin and Old English might not have seemed all that different to an eighth-century reader, making such an act of appropriation possible for both the nameless youth and the HE's eighth-century audience.
Chapter two, "Prayer: Solomon and Saturn I," reads the Pater Noster episode inSolomon and Saturn I--in which, one by one, the very letters of the prayer bind and abuse the devil--as a means of reenchanting a familiar text for monks bored by its rote application. In identifying with Saturn's "painful desire" to know the Pater Noster, Dumitrescu argues, the monastic reader is put back in touch with his or her own educational experiences, feeling anew the intense longing to comprehend what was both a foundational prayer and a foundational school text in the Middle Ages (59). She further argues that the Pater Noster episode offers a microcosm of elementary education, asSolomon and Saturn stages an analysis of the prayer on the level of the letter, with attention to the specific power and significance of every sound. She also sees echoes of pedagogical punishment in the assaults of the Pater Noster's various letters on the devil, making a connection between harsh corporal discipline (which she customarily calls "pedagogical violence") and spiritual warfare. The text's threat of violence, however, is balanced by its playfulness: whatever terrors it may hold for the novice reader, it offers the experienced reader a master class in meditative and mnemonic techniques designed to transform the practice of rote prayer into a spiritual ruminatio. Dumitrescu's readings of Solomon and Saturn I are compelling in their thoroughness and attention to detail, but the chapter's basic assumption--that Anglo-Saxon monks would have felt it boring to recite the Pater Noster--may give some readers pause. While the assumption does not seem unreasonable, it is very much a modern one, as current pedagogical discourse tends to deemphasize rote learning as both dull and unsophisticated. The great emphasis on active memory in Classical, Late Antique and early medieval pedagogy, as Mary Carruthers et al. have demonstrated, might have rendered Solomon and Saturn I's original audience less skeptical about the inherent delights of memorization and recitation than we are.
Chapter three, "Violence: Ælfric Bata's Colloquies," reads Ælfric Bata's Colloquies as a subtle and nuanced critique of pedagogical violence. While Dumitrescu acknowledges that pedagogical violence might not have been as widespread in reality as it is in Bata's text, she argues persuasively that the Colloquies show how violence, threatened and actual, may play a productive role in education, ultimately linking the suffering of Bata's imagined students to the suffering of Christ on the cross. At the same time, Dumitrescu sees a partial retraction of that position at the end of the Colloquies, as Colloquy 25 questions the efficacy of pedagogical violence through the example of a monk who is unable to punish an oblate into compliance. Dumitrescu's reflections on the possible performance of the Colloquies in the classroom are particularly interesting: what would it mean to ask young students to inhabit both the role of the monk inflicting the punishment and the role of the oblate suffering it? How would such dramatic exercises have shaped the development of oblates into teachers with the power to inflict such punishments on their own students? One is always grateful to scholars who teach us how to ask better questions of the texts we read.
In chapter four, "Recollection: Andreas," Dumitrescu argues that Andreas drew on both the Old English Elene and the Latin text of Boethius to develop a vision of anamnesis, the process of learning through recollection associated with Platonic and Neoplatonic theories of human knowledge. The connections she draws to Boethius and the discussion of the word wrætlic on pp. 127-8 are both important contributions. The discussion of wrætlic also occasions one of the clearest statements about the distinctively Anglo-Saxon texture of educational experience Dumitrescu observes in her book: "Anglo-Saxons understood teaching to be a positive process that often happened through negative or difficult emotions. We miss this, because our ideal pedagogies do not frighten or traumatize students; we prefer to inspire, nourish, and comfort them. Anglo-Saxons understood negative emotions as tools that could be used in teaching, or in mental work more broadly, but not uncritically: like the wrætlic stone angel, wondrous, terrifying things were liable to go their own way once you had called them to do your bidding" (127). That passage states the book's argument with admirable clarity, and speaks to its audience not only in their capacity as scholars, but also in their capacity as teachers. Moments like this one show the ways in which we might use the traces of medieval educational experience to reflect upon our own pedagogical assumptions and practices, and how we may best respond to the needs of our own cultural moment.
Chapter five, "Desire: The Life of St. Mary of Egypt," reads the Old English Life closely against its Latin source to show how the translation "persistently highlight[s] the dangers of teaching with desire" (155). At the same time, the text underscores the necessity of teaching with desire--by which Dumitrescu seems to mean awakening desire in the student--as a means to move Zosimus beyond the pedagogical approaches which have failed him so far: both the exemplary pedagogy of his first monastery, and the contemplative approach of his second. The danger of teaching with desire is that students may come to desire the wrong objects, or to desire right and wrong objects simultaneously; Zosimus desires spiritual truth, but the shadow of a physical desire for Mary hovers over the text. Dumitrescu's reading of the Latin and Old English Lives is precise and persuasive, and her description of the Old English Life's particular emphasis on the dangers of desire is compelling.
The conclusion observes that these five texts all figure education as an extended process of initiation, a means of entering and taking one's place in communities that continues long after childhood's end. As a corollary to the foregoing, the last pages of the book point towards certain texts--Gregory's Dialogues in particular--that figure death itself as a moment of instruction, as a particular lucidity of both intellect and spirit attends the departure from earthly life. The last sentences of the book point towards a vision of learning as a lifelong process, with its share of pleasure and pain, suffering and joy: "teaching...is a turbulent mingling of suffering and memory and longing and death. It is a chosen genealogy, the forging of a link in the chain of history. But it is also a matter of love" (162). The book ends, then, with a confident statement that education was depicted as a way of life--and even a way of death--in Anglo-Saxon literature. Through its complications, traumas, and temptations, educational experience provided a modus vivendi that helped students to negotiate the vicissitudes of life in the early Middle Ages.
For the literary critic interested in how the Anglo-Saxons described educational experience, or in any of the five texts Dumitrescu selects for analysis, The Experience of Education is a wonderful resource, thoroughly grounded in scholarship (especially literary scholarship) and nuanced in its engagements with texts. The book demonstrates how traditional methods can speak to the concerns of the present, as close reading, philology, and source study allow Dumitrescu to paint a rich and compelling portrait of educational experience. Readers with more of an historian's bent might find the book somewhat less exciting, as Dumitrescu's commitment to New Criticism means that The Experience of Education occasionally misses chances to make connections to specific historical contexts. This is perhaps most evident in chapter five, where the various models of teaching Dumitrescu identifies could profitably be situated within the context of tenth-century efforts at monastic reform. A similar comment might be made about chapter two, where the central assumption that a monastic learner would have found the Pater Noster boring to recite could use confirmation in historical sources. Even the discussion of pedagogical violence that spans chapters two and three might benefit from more context, as students and teachers in different periods and places may not have viewed physical discipline in the same way. It is important to remember that Dumitrescu makes it clear that she is not writing history, but instead practicing an historically informed literary criticism that accepts its inability to illuminate all facets of experience and sheds what light it can. On its own terms, the book is a success, and will repay the efforts of its readers many times over.