| Anglo-Saxons considered pain to be a central element of pedagogy. Given the brutality with which the medieval period is associated in popular discourse, this in itself is not remarkable. Yet the texts examined in this dissertation complicate the idea of educationally useful pain. The desire for learning is depicted in painful language, physical danger often serves as the impetus for an instructional encounter, and imagined pain is used for cognitive, evidential, and mnemonic purposes.;Although pain, in these texts, is seen as an integral part of the teaching moment, Anglo-Saxon attitudes toward it are neither predictable nor straightforward. While educational pain is certainly not taboo in the Anglo-Saxon texts in the way it generally is in contemporary Western educational practice, neither is it beyond criticism. The Latin and Old English texts which dramatize the pain of teaching and learning do so with full awareness of the fear and torment caused by pain, and with critical understanding of its possible negative effects for pedagogy.;My first chapter is an introduction to the problem of pain in medieval works about education. In a subsequent chapter on Ælfric Bata's Colloquies, I argue that imaginary violence was productive both in teaching language and in enforcing social norms and moral behavior, but that the effectiveness of corporal punishment would have been offset by its ability to elicit a cycle of uncontrollable violence. In my third chapter, I read Solomon and Saturn I and a miraculous story in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People as dramatic representations of the mystical, arduous, and sometimes miraculous entry of the individual into language itself. Both these texts depict the state of ignorance or speechlessness in terms of physical disability and confinement, and the entry into language as radical, though painful, liberation. Finally, the fourth chapter shows how the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt presents a notion of charismatic pedagogy that incorporates deep suffering and human fallibility in a powerful and dangerously seductive teaching moment. |
