Irina Dumitrescu: The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

• Laura Saetveit Miles

Irina Dumitrescu’s monograph examines how teaching and learning work in the literature of England’s pre-Conquest early medieval period. She deftly combines historicist, formalist, and close reading approaches to examine a selection of poems and prose works in Old English and Latin. Under her scrutiny they reveal the conflicting feelings of love, desire, pain, and suffering that medieval people encountered in their educational experiences. The book argues that English people in this period “recognised how emotionally and cognitively intricate the process of education is, and that they reflected on this experience by translating, adapting, and composing fictions of teaching”. Such a claim brings important nuance to the current state of the field regarding medieval education, and pushes beyond current views on how ideology and emotion work in pedagogies of the past.