Prosopopoeia, Pedagogy, and Paradoxical Possibility: The “Mother” in the Sixteenth-Century Grammar School

Abstract

In sixteenth-century male writers’ descriptions of the English grammar school program, mothers were imagined as impediments to boys’ learning. Yet these same writers paradoxically turned to a “mother” figure, prosopopoeia, as the rhetorical device through which they imagined and brought into being a humanist-inspired education. By embedding maternal narratives, bodies, and language in their explanations of grammar school and its “mat(t)er,” the writers of rhetorical manuals, grammar school textbooks, and pedagogical handbooks position the mother at the center of early modern thought, which has implications and consequences for actual mothers and their participation in early modern rhetorical education.

Notes

1. 1I thank my colleague, Peg Strain, for her comments on multiple drafts of this essay. I am also especially grateful to RR reviewers John Schaeffer and Steven Corbett, whose generous comments helped me substantially revise and strengthen this essay.

2. 2On the potential dangers of women’s reproduction see Gowing; Paster; Willis.

3. 3On early modern fixations on social order, including women’s expected enclosure in homes, see Amussen; Fletcher; Stallybrass; Tillyard; Underdown; Wrightson.

4. 4In early modern conduct literature, “enclosure” was most often associated with the private home and used to contain mothers and daughters within that sphere, which Dod and Cleaver explain: “a good wife keeps her home … and keep[s] at home: as though home were chastities keeper” (223).

5. 5On debates about corporeal punishment in handbooks, see Bushnell (esp. chap. 2).

6. 6On the prevailing practice of corporeal punishments in schools, see Ong and Enterline on “Latin learning as a puberty rite” (including physical punishment as a typical procedure of learning Latin) and corporal punishment as a performative practices in schoolrooms.

7. 7On pedagogical eros, see Bushnell; Wall; Ong, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology.

8. 8On the hazards of women’s breastfeeding, see Paster; Wall.

9. 9Wall argues that male physicians coopted midwives’ practices to malign and exclude them from the medical profession; I argue that pedagogical handbook writers similarly coopt mothers’ duties to preserve children through physic.

10. 10Crane and Bushnell trace the frequency of gardening tropes in handbooks, arguing that these tropes imagined the early modern self as “cultured and cultivated” and imagined schoolmasters as progenitors. Certainly, a horticultural vocabulary permeates these texts, but this same language is used in medical treatises concerned with procreation, pregnancies, and breastfeeding. Here, I propose that reading these tropes as maternal reproduction is as valid as reading them as gardening, farming, and harvesting.

11. 11Many critics demonstrate that Latin learning was a site of contest in early modern England and that Latin learning in grammar schools helps us understand how these texts engaged with the religious contests of the sixteenth century. However, after the Protestant Reformation, even though the school’s basic curriculum did not change, emphasis on Latin wanes as rhetoric was more often taught and read in English translation.

12. 12Orme explains that teaching vernacular English in schools was unique compared to schools on the continent (3). Mann, too, notes that rhetorical and pedagogical handbooks “came to believe that England needed [a] distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community” (2).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Mackay

Elizabeth Mackay is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Dayton, where she teaches courses in English literature, Shakespeare, early modern women writers, and composition.