Susie Phillips: "Teaching 'Otherwise': Schoolmasters, Seduction, and Slavery in Premodern England"

The Northwestern professor discusses popular—and radical—vernacular textbooks of the 15th and 16th centuries
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Event Date & Time
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Event Location
Pillsbury Hall 412

310 Pillsbury Drive SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

The Department of English and the Joseph Warren Beach Lectures present Northwestern University Professor Susie Phillips. This event is hybrid. No registration needed for in-person event. Register for Zoom access. Co-sponsored by French & Italian, German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch, Premodern Studies, and RIDGS.

What happens when the schoolmaster is banished from the early modern classroom? The popular vernacular textbooks that flooded the European market in the 15th and 16th centuries posed precisely this question when they claimed—on title pages and in prefatory material—not simply to stand in for the schoolmaster, but to displace him altogether. Most were practical how-to guides that offered entertaining dialogues and real-world scenarios to an audience of linguists of the lower orders, readers who sought not a thorough and grammatical knowledge of other languages, but practical lessons in conversation. Yet these texts did not simply eschew linguistic and grammatical discipline, they flouted the rules of ethical, moral, and social discipline that governed the premodern classroom, adopting the unruly premodern marketplace as the scene of their instruction. Providing instruction in both the language of the multilingual market and the tricks of its trade, these vernacular textbooks launched a radical pedagogical experiment that ran alongside, underneath, and, at times, in competition with the more familiar project of the Humanist grammar schools. In this talk, Phillips will show how adopting the humbler pedagogical perspective of these little books enables us to uncover some surprising stories—tales of resourceful chambermaids, savvy black stableboys, and arithmetically-adept barmaids whom these textbooks ask readers to imitate; the story of a schoolgirl who compiled and published a textbook of her own; and the narrative of a Black schoolmaster teaching in Elizabethan London.

This event is free and open to the public. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528. 

Susie Phillips is associate professor of English at Northwestern University and winner of an Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professorship, the University’s highest award for distinguished teaching. Author of Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (2007), she has published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy. Her current project, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England (forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press in spring 2025) examines the multilingual dictionaries and phrasebooks that flooded the European marketplace in the 15th and 16th centuries, opening a virtual classroom to an audience who did not have access to formal education and offering instruction in the pragmatic, and murky, ethics of the premodern marketplace. 

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