A brief history of Anglo‐Saxon education

Abstract

While the Anglo-Saxon period is not always considered the most dynamic milieu for medieval education, recent work in the field belies that impression. Since the 1980s, Anglo-Latinists have edited, translated, and analyzed glosses, treatises, letters, and prefaces that enrich our understanding of Anglo-Saxon education. The turn in the 1990s towards the study of literacy, and subsequent interest in bilingualism, have situated Old English literary texts against the background of educational theory and practice. In recent years, interest in education seems only to have accelerated. Two recent monographs, Emily Thornbury's Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England (2014) and Irina Dumitrescu's The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2018), push the boundaries of the field by exploring Anglo-Saxon educational experience in a variety of literary texts. Simultaneously, work on the textual cultures of Anglo-Saxon England-increasingly collaborative and digital-continues to elucidate what and how the Anglo-Saxons read. The recent dynamism of the field offers new opportunities for both Anglo-Saxonists and historians of education going forward.