University of Brighton College of Arts and Humanities

Literature Seminar Series 2014-15

Jennifer Richards, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, Newcastle University

Abstract

We know a great deal about Tudor education. We know what the schoolroom may have looked like and we also know what was studied in it. What we don’t know, however, is what the schoolroom sounded like, although we can assume that it was full of voices. Education in the Renaissance, like the medieval period, was oral. Script was read aloud in the schoolroom at every level, at every stage. Yet, this vocality of teaching and learning is generally not foregrounded. In this paper I will consider first of all the kind of evidence we might use to recover the sounds of the schoolroom, focussing especially on the teaching of the rhetorical figures of speech and tropes. Secondly, I will try to answer the question ‘why might this recovery matter?’ What might a textual practice attentive to sound ‘look’ like? And what different histories of the classroom might we be able to tell if we try to ‘listen’ to the textual evidence?

Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture at Newcastle University, Jennifer Richards is the author of Rhetoric: The New Critical Idiom (2007) and Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (2003; 2007). She is currently editing Thomas Nash, with Andrew Hadfield, for Oxford University Press, and she is writing a new monograph, Useful Books: Reading and Talking in the English Renaissance. This last project is supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, 2013-2015. She is the Editor of the journal Renaissance Studies.

For further information, please contact John Wrighton