Conference Review
The Medieval Schoolroom and the Literary Arts: Grammar and its Institutions
10-12 July 2008
This conference was convened in order to promote the investigation of the neglected connection between schoolroom training (of the most basic grammatical kind) and literary accomplishment. Papers, by a wide range of scholars (from the U. S., U.K., Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, and Australia), from a wide variety of departments and fields, explored many of the specific procedures and practices of pedagogy from the primer school to the university. Some papers focused more on grammar, others more broadly on literary terms or effects, but together the contributions in the conference began to sketch out a new interdisciplinary territory. More particularly, the conference broadened our understanding of the fate of certain late antique texts in the medieval schoolroom (using copious manuscript evidence), the nature of schoolroom compendia employed in Britain, the history of terms for poetic figures and their definition, the role of Occitan grammars in the shaping of a corpus of troubadour poetry, the idea of the 'canon' in relation to the texts used for grammatical training, the importance of 'female' (and impersonated) emotion in the medieval classroom, the importance of humor in grammatical training, the role grammars play in documenting the increasing access of women to the literary vernacular, and the radical departure from medieval methods and aesthetics visible humanist approaches to grammar. The participants in the conference, both speakers and attendees alike, were full of praise both throughout and since (by e-mail) for the quality of the papers and the intellectual coherence of the conference. The idea of a volume collecting up this important work was already in the air before the conference was half over, and a number of speakers have already expressed their hope that their pieces would find such a home. Our plan is to put together a proposal in the next months and, perhaps with a few other solicited contributions, publish a volume containing versions of the papers given at the conference under the conference's title.
