Liner Notes
In this episode, Casey Boyle and Mark Longaker talk with Martin Camargo, Jordan Loveridge, and Marjorie Woods about Woods's recent book Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom (Princeton UP, 2019). Longaker and Boyle summarize the book (.05-5.10); relying on Martin Camargo, Jordan Loveridge, and Jorie Woods, Longaker and Boyle situation Weeping for Dido in the scholarly conversation about medieval rhetorical pedagogy (5.11-16.57), and they additionally explain why scholars in composition studies, gender studies, and digital rhetorics might enjoy Weeping for Dido (16.58-26.00). Jorie Woods teaches Longaker how to pronounce Achilleid and Deidameia (26.01-27.18). Conclusion and credits (27.18-28.06).
Music featured in this episode is sampled from "leaves"(cdk Mix) by Analog By Nature (c) copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/34427 Ft: Reuse Noise
Transcript
Mark Longaker: Welcome to the first sonic rhetoric review, a series of podcasts where we discuss contemporary scholarly works about classical and medieval rhetoric. In this series, we hope to remediate the genre of the scholarly book review, accomplishing everything that a book review achieves. Each review will summarize a recent book situated in contemporary scholarship and offer thoughts about the future scholarship made possible by each of the books that we discuss. Today, we'll be talking about Marjorie Woods's Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom, published by Princeton University Press in 2019.
My name is Mark Longaker. I'm a historian of rhetoric focusing on the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Together with Casey Boyle, I'll be your host.
Casey Boyle: Hi, I'm Casey Boyle. I am a professor here at Texas. I am not a historian of rhetoric. I do not focus on the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries. My scholarly focus in teaching is on digital rhetoric and media studies.
Mark Longaker: Casey, you and I are not experts in classical or medieval rhetoric. Is that right?
Casey Boyle: That is correct.
Mark Longaker: And that's why we've consulted with Martin Camargo, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and Jordan Loveridge, a professor of communications at Mount St. Mary's University. Martin and Jordan will help us to situate Weeping for Dido in contemporary scholarship. They'll also help us to see the scholarly potential made possible by Woods' recent book. Additionally, we've talked with Marjorie Woods herself, asking her what wanted to accomplish with her most recent scholarly project.
Casey Boyle: While we situate Weeping for Dido in the existing work on the history of classical and medieval rhetoric, we'll also try to understand what the book has to offer rhetoric scholars in other sub-disciplines, such as my own digital rhetoric and composition studies, as well.
Mark Longaker: Now, before we do any of that, we should start with a summary. The main argument in Marjorie Woods's Weeping for Dido is that, during the medieval period, teaching the classics mattered more than the classics themselves. Woods contends that medieval schoolmasters used Latin texts to emotionally engage students by allowing them to explore gender roles, by permitting students to experience emotional connections, and by encouraging them to perform rich speeches. Woods pursues this argument by closely examining the glosses in medieval manuscript reproductions of three texts. These are Virgil's Aeneid, the anonymously authored Achilleid, and the anonymously authored Ilias Latina.
Now, everybody knows the Aeneid. Casey, I know you read the Aeneid front to back probably last week, but not many people know about the Achilleid or the Ilias Latina. Just a brief introduction. The Achilleid is the story of Achilles's time as a boy living on an island in a woman's court hiding because his mother did not want him to die in the Trojan War. And the Ilias Latina is like a comic-book version of the Iliad, focusing on main characters, their heroic speeches, and their brave deeds. Woods sees this project as a counterpoint to another recent book that she's published, that is, Classroom Commentaries that was published with the Ohio State University Press in 2017.
Marjorie Woods: The book that I wrote before this on all of the manuscripts of the Poetria Nova was meant to be a book that would stand the test of time. That it would be as useful 40 or 50 years from now as now because no one else would go through the same material. But I wrote this one for now. Fine if people read it later, but this is something I want people to look at now and think about. It feels urgent because I think it can understand a period presented so problematically that, even just if you say you're working on it, people think you're crazy. For me, this is a new book. It's very contemporary in what I want to get back from it, whereas the other one can sit on the shelf and talk to people for a long time.
Mark Longaker: In the effort to make her book relevant to contemporary teachers of writing, Woods focuses on the medieval glosses to these classical works, glosses indicating how young boys might have studied these classical works while learning Latin. She notices that these medieval glosses indicate where teachers and students would've invested their time. The teachers’ glosses note which passages students might have performed in the classroom, sometimes to comical, sometimes to tragic effect. These glosses also highlight the opportunities for play and experimentation. Fun classroom experiences that emphasize what Woods calls "three interrelated aspects of medieval teaching: emotion, gender, and performance."
That's on page two. Casey, you and I have already talked about how Jorie offers a refreshing look at medieval rhetorical pedagogy. In my conversation with Martin Camargo, he raised an interesting question about the medieval glosses and about Woods's emphasis on play as a way to make the Latin language and Latin literature more engaging and more memorable.
Martin Camargo: You're talking about highlighting emotions, encouraging students to re-experience those emotions. The big payoff for them is memory. So then someone might say, "Okay, memory of what?" Pedagogy is designed to impart certain kinds of skills. What are the skills that this is supposedly imparting?
Casey Boyle: I liked Martin's question, but I liked Woods's reply even more.
Marjorie Woods: I thought that was interesting because they're using these texts, not so much to emphasize content, but to teach Latin.
Casey Boyle: But she also points out that medieval teachers must have been teaching some Ciceronian rhetoric because they often wrote marginal analyses of the speeches using Ciceronian terms. Many of these speeches in the Ilias Latina, for instance, are glossed using the five parts of the Ciceronian oration.
Marjorie Woods: That was one of the first things I noticed when I was working on the manuscript. I actually thought they were kind of boring. They were just pointing out the parts of a speech. And when I started going through them and comparing different manuscripts, the best example isn't actually in the book. Comparing two copies that I think were copied from each other, one of them actually is in the book, about particularly Aeneas's response to Dido's outrage. In one of the manuscripts, it says he gives a positive response and then a negative response. And what it means by that is he gives a reason for leaving and then a reason against staying.
And then another manuscript just said a reason, another reason, another reason. In one of them, it's cumulative, and, in the other, it's a zigzag. The distinctions between these are important. I started just looking at them.
Mark Longaker:
Mentioning Cicero also raises something that both you and I noticed about Jorie's book. We liked her emphasis on Cicero's rhetorical theory. In my own work on modern rhetorical theory, I noticed a lot of attention to Aristotle's analysis of the emotions and rhetoric, but I've long thought that Cicero offers valuable resources for contemporary rhetoricians.
Casey Boyle: I agree. One of the things that is important for Cicero, at least in my area, is he's one of the first rhetoricians who were involved in the theory of rhetoric, but also the practice and the teaching of it.
Mark Longaker: While we were reading Weeping for Dido, we appreciated Jorie's attempt to put aside Aristotle. She told us that she's been trying to sideline Aristotle for some time.
Marjorie Woods: I think that's one of the most important things that I'm interested in. First of all, I don't find Aristotle myself particularly useful, and he wasn't used as a teaching text in the Middle Ages. In fact, he wasn't used really as a teaching text until much later, several centuries later. One of the things that I'm trying to do is belligerently anti-Aristotle as a way of throwing people off their normal stance because I think Cicero is much more interesting from a literary point of view. I'm very much a text person using rhetoric to inform and generate responses. I'd like to make literature students more cognizant of rhetoric and historical modes and have rhetoric students work with texts that are memorable.
Mark Longaker: And Martin Camargo agreed that this attention to Cicero as a resource for emotion performance is one of Jorie's most important scholarly contributions.
Martin Camargo: In terms of the history of emotions, what I think she does particularly well is to show how a different theoretical construct from the one that's typically used by medievalists — it’s straight from Aristotle. And that makes a lot of sense. Replacement of Aristotle with Cicero means that you're focusing not on emotions as sources of argument, but emotions as components of performance. She does a really great job, I think, of showing what parts of Ciceronian rhetoric are most relevant to that, so, clearly, attributes of persons and actions but also, less obviously, the modes of delivery associated with the different parts of an oration.
Casey Boyle: Since we're talking about what we liked about the book, I want to say that I enjoy the stylistic and typographical features in Weeping for Dido. Woods writes in an engaging, playful way, and she reproduces images in the manuscripts themselves, showing the reader what it's like to hold and maybe even teach from a medieval book.
Mark Longaker: You'll be glad to know, Casey, that Martin Camargo agrees with you completely. He said that one of Woods's most important scholarly contributions is her use of these glosses to teach readers about classroom pedagogy.
Martin Camargo: She's obviously making maximal use of evidence that doesn't typically get used and doesn't get used in the way that she uses it. That's what strikes me. I mean, I've used the glosses to make points about pedagogy. But what's interesting about this particular book of Jorie's is the way that she actually recreates the experience, partly because she writes in a way that is lively, scholarly, but accessible, but even typographically. There are all kinds of techniques that she uses that help us understand that experience of the emotions within the classroom as students are reading these texts under the guidance of teachers using techniques that go back to antiquity and that, Jorie being Jorie, she would like to see revived.
Mark Longaker: And Jordan Loveridge said that Woods's analysis of these manuscript glosses would help future scholars to better understand the medieval culture of creative reappropriation.
Jordan Loveridge: I would just add, one additional area that I consider myself to work in to some extent, and I think this book engages with – maybe not explicitly in terms of how it's naming its method, but certainly in terms of the concerns – and that would be classical reception or reception studies. Resituating what we take to be important from a period and by focusing on glossing and commentary practices and the pedagogical experience, as Martin mentioned, that is so difficult to learn about without looking at this type of evidence.
I think that, by engaging that type of evidence or that type of historical material, Jorie is really doing an excellent job of, I think, challenging something that often rubs me the wrong way about the treatment of the medieval period, and that's this focus more on what is, like, novel or noteworthy for the future. When you look at it that way, you bring a particular bias or a lens to it that obviously affects how you see it and interpret it. But, when you focus instead on the practice of classical reception, if you try to understand instead the period as one that is focused on this long tradition of receiving and reinterpreting and reevaluating and reapplying all of these ancient texts for new ends, when you see it that way, the period starts to look a lot different and one of the questions that I think that this book raises, that I think that field could grapple with maybe even more than it does currently, which is, how would we see this period differently if we change the framework of our evaluation for understanding it? How might looking at the period in that way maybe make our understanding of the period more complete, more inclusive, and more just intellectually interesting?
Mark Longaker: Martin Camargo elaborated on this point, saying that we're too caught up in novelty, but Woods's book would help us to understand that, all the way up through the Renaissance, people didn't want new literature; rather, they wanted elaborate and creative performances of classical texts.
Martin Camargo: Part of the medieval reception of those classical works is what you could call “remaking.” But there's a tendency for people to see that as kind of quaint. One of the things that Jorie does is legitimate the form of reappropriation, which is heightened language, very artificial language, expressing intense emotion. All these speeches, this is how they're reading the Aeneid, and The big point is it's how they read it in generations after Virgil's. It's not like the Middle Ages invented this way of reading it. They're actually continuing an authentic tradition, and early modern writers are the same way. They wanted heightened language expressing intense emotion, artificiality up the wazoo.
Mark Longaker: And Jordan added that many aspects of contemporary culture similarly champion creative reappropriation, prompting Martin to hope that Woods's work might help contemporary teachers and students to creatively appropriate classical texts in their own classroom.
Jordan Loveridge: But one of the other things that I thought that Jorie did a great job with in making it accessible was some of the parallels that she drew between the medieval practices and more contemporary ones. And something that Jorie brought up, which is this parallel to practices associated with fandom and fan fiction, and so many of my students are interested in those things. I loved seeing that and Jorie in her serious consideration of it. She was citing scholarship in fan studies and putting that pedagogical element in conversation with the scholarship that's happening in those areas.
Martin Camargo: We have to overcome certain habits our students form. It's uncool to lose yourself in the way that this kind of pedagogy demands. This is what students were taught to do for most of human history, and she brings that up in the book itself, that this kind of pedagogy is liberating for students.
Casey Boyle: Weeping for Dido did encourage me to see the medieval period as a time for creative appropriation, not just static repetition of the classics. But I was surprised to learn that Woods herself was pursuing yet a different goal. She said that her playful writing style, her graphic reproduction of manuscripts, and her references to popular culture were an effort to make the manuscript more approachable.
Marjorie Woods: One of the things I would like to do is to make people a little bit more open to actually looking at manuscripts. The first time I opened a medieval manuscript in The British Library, even though I'd had a whole year of paleography, which was based on very clear, simple texts, I remember looking at the person who gave it to me, and I said, "How are we supposed to read this?" And I just got up and left. That's one reason I think there's such a gap between what we see and what is in the manuscripts that it's almost impossible to bridge that gap, and I wanted to make it possible for the book to maybe help people to do that later on, too.
Mark Longaker: So, based on our interviews with Jordan Loveridge, Martin Camargo, and Jorie Woods, it seems like Weeping for Dido makes three major contributions to scholarship. The book asks us to see the medieval classroom as a playful space, using emotion and performance to enhance the teaching of Latin and classical rhetoric. Weeping for Dido also asks us to reevaluate the medieval period so that we can see the creative reappropriation of classical texts, rather than the stale preservation of Western tradition. And, finally, Woods asks contemporary scholars to see that research in medieval manuscript culture can be enjoyable and approachable.
Casey Boyle: Yeah. These are the book's main contributions to the history of rhetoric, but I think what Weeping for Dido and Woods have accomplished there also speaks to scholars in other sub-disciplines. I was particularly taken by Jorie's attention to gender. She makes the medieval classroom seem like a feminine space by noticing that medieval students and teachers paid their closest attention to the female characters in these literary works. The book's title and the first chapter both emphasized the attention given to Dido's speeches in the Aeneid.
Mark Longaker: It's funny that you mentioned that, Casey, because Jordan Loveridge also commented that, even today, his students are more drawn to Dido's speeches than they are to Aeneas's orations.
Jordan Loveridge: I teach at a small liberal-arts school, and we have a core curriculum, and one of the required texts is the Aeneid. In a very Jorie-esque assignment, I actually asked the students to compose and perform speeches in character, and they have the option of either choosing Aeneas sort of bidding farewell to Dido, or Dido upon hearing that Aeneas is going to leave. No one chooses Aeneas. I think that, we're considering that almost like a test of some of the hypotheses in her book. I think she's right, right? No one chooses Aeneas. Dido is by far the more compelling character, and it does not matter, sort of, the gender identity of the student.
Mark Longaker: Jordan also noticed, however, that many of the speeches given by female characters were triggered by moments of sexual violence or misogyny. One of the most oft-repeated speeches in the Achilleid is in response to Achilles's rape of Deidamia.
Casey Boyle: I think those are pronounced “the ack-ILL-ee-ad” and “die-duh-ME-ah.”
Mark Longaker: I honestly have no idea. We can at least agree about how to pronounce “Aeneas” and “Dido.”
Casey Boyle: For now, yes.
Mark Longaker: And maybe we can agree with Jordan Loveridge, who said it's alarming that one of the most commonly and comically performed speeches in the Aeneid is prompted by Aeneas's abandoning of Dido, who then burns all of Aeneas's stuff and throws herself on the pyre of his belongings.
Jordan Loveridge: There's a lot of positive evaluation of emotion. That struck me because what is the emotional or, like, the affective trigger for so many of these events in these ancient texts. It's largely sexual violence and misogyny. And I wonder about the more negative potential aspect of such a sustained emotional confrontation or engagement with those kinds of scenarios, especially for young men, which, as Jorie mentions, a lot of this was probably performed somewhat comically. She notes the potentially troubling implications of approaching some of those scenes from the comic mode that might have been common, and so my point there is just simply that I think that there's probably a whole other book project just with that.
Casey Boyle: I agree that there's a lot of scholarly potential here, opportunities to discuss the construction of gender and gender-bending. I was taken, for instance, by Woods's analysis of Achilles’s cross-dressing in the ack-ILL-ee-ad.
Mark Longaker: You're not going to let that go, are you?
Casey Boyle: No, because in the ack-ILL-ee-ad, Achilles's mother has hidden him on an island and in the company of other girls his age. Achilles has to pretend to be a girl to fit in. Woods analyzes Achilles's gender-bending, suggesting that school boys would have to read his story and would have been given an opportunity to explore taboo subjects and scandalous gender roles.
Mark Longaker: When I talked to Jorie, though, she didn't emphasize her contribution to gender studies. She said the main takeaway should be the emotional investment, the play, afforded by these episodes. She conceded that comic performance of sexual violence is troubling, but she also said it may have served an important pedagogical function in the medieval classroom.
Marjorie Woods: What I wanted to emphasize was exhilaration and joy in the classroom, and also funny things. I do think there are ways that people can imitate Dido dying in a pretty funny way, although to me, she's the most tragic of all characters. But one of the things about the fact that these were all read by younger students is really important. I believe in what students can respond to, and I think emotions are what they respond to the most when they're younger.
Casey Boyle: I also thought that Woods offered a revisionist account of the medieval classroom. Now, I'm not a historian; I admit that. But, when I think of medieval pedagogy, I don't think of playful exercises or comic performances. Nevertheless, that's what Woods describes.
Mark Longaker: Martin Camargo also noticed the contrast between the common perception of the medieval classroom and the joyful exercises that Woods describes.
Martin Camargo: What I was trying to do was imagine myself as somebody who came to this book never having read any of Jorie's work. The account Jorie's giving is a very positive one. But anybody who comes to a book about the emotions and the medieval classroom is immediately going to come with the stereotype. If you've seen a picture of Grammar, she's carrying a rod. Okay? Everybody's familiar with the idea of fear as the emotion that dominates. One of the questions that somebody might raise is: how does that jibe with the focus here on the positive emotions?
Mark Longaker: And Woods admitted that there were stern medieval school masters, as well as abusive pedagogical practices, but she explains that the popular may overstate the medieval reality. She furthermore explains that she wanted to account for another aspect of medieval rhetorical pedagogy.
Marjorie Woods: Well, one of my most interesting exchanges about this happened many years ago when I was first in Austin, and I was at a conference with Peter Elbow, very famous in composition studies, but he also started out as a medievalist. He turned to me, and he said, "How can you study a period when they beat children in the classroom?" And I'm like, "They beat children when I was in the classroom." I mean, we have a very sanitized or very demonized picture of education in any period. I don't think everything was, like, super fun. Some of the most insightful periods of my own education were in very fraught classrooms, but I still responded incredibly positively to the material.
Anything that generated a sense of fun from that was something that I held on to. I'm trying to point out what I find really consistent, a consistent element in the medieval classroom. We used the Middle Ages as a sort of dumping ground for everything we don't like about teaching without realizing how complex some of it can be because, otherwise, if you're not doing this, what do you do with the fact that often Dido's speeches have the most glosses on them? Or they're the ones that have the most musical notation that we know, that boys were singing Dido's laments in the classroom?
Casey Boyle: This is a revisionist account of medieval pedagogy.
Mark Longaker: Yeah, I think so. Jordan Loveridge suggested that contemporary teachers of composition can learn from this revisionist account.
Jordan Loveridge: I'm from a rhetoric and composition background, and I think that that's relatively uncommon for people approaching medieval rhetoric from a scholarly perspective. I think that most people are probably trained more in literary studies or history or medieval studies, but my intellectual background and my training and my PhD is in rhetoric and composition, and so one of the things that I ask myself or think about is the historiography associated with that discipline in particular. For me, bringing my very particular background and my very particular concerns, looking at it, I would've loved to have seen more consideration of, well, what could this book do for people who maybe have these not quite accurate or distorted understandings of what rhetorical education or the history of rhetoric or the theory of rhetoric in the medieval period looks like?
Mark Longaker: In response to Jordan, Woods explained that her most recent book, Classroom Commentaries, and her next scholarly project both demonstrate what contemporary composition teachers can learn from medieval pedagogues.
Marjorie Woods: I have written bits and pieces on this. The last part of my book before this, called Classroom Commentaries, talks about how the examples of exercises from the Poetria Nova, the medieval text I studied the manuscripts of, relate more to creative-writing exercises you use now than more traditional exercises. I think those should be more combined. One of the things that's really great about this is it's inspiring me to really make sure that I write this last book that I want to do, which is about using, on the one hand, historical exercises for teaching literature and, on the other, to use the ones that I call the big four: imitation, variation, amplification, and abbreviation in a transhistorical way.
I want to write it for both rhetoric and literature people because historically, these two things have always been connected. The separation of them, I think, makes each of them drier, less interesting, and less emotionally engaging.
Casey Boyle: So, even if you're not a historian of rhetoric, Weeping for Dido can teach you about gender, performance, and composition pedagogy.
Mark Longaker: Yep, that's right.
Casey Boyle: Just out of my own curiosity, did Jorie teach you how to pronounce some of these ancient names and titles?
Mark Longaker: She did.
Marjorie Woods: Yes. Yes. I think my answers will make you laugh. “die-duh-ME-ah,” which is, I think, what Casey said, looks like the way it's pronounced from what I can tell historically. But what I did was check the translation by Stanley Lombardo of the text, and he says “die-duh-ME-ah.” And the other one, I know the other one you're going to ask me, is the Achilleid. Okay, so here's what's happened with this because I wasn't sure, either. I was asking my classist friends, and, mostly, they would say, “ack-ill-LAY-id.” I would say to my students, we would be talking about the Achilleid and the Aeneid. It was very hard for them because those are essentially two different ways of pronouncing words that look very similar and actually are quite similar.
Because people were doing both, I again went to Stanley Lombardo, and I said, "Well, how do you pronounce it?" He said, ``I pronounce it like ‘ah-KNEE-id.’” I say, “ack-ILL-ee-ad." And I'm, like, okay, if Stanley can do it, I'll do it.
Casey Boyle: So I was right.
Mark Longaker: Yes. I've learned a lot from Jorie and a little from you. Thanks to Casey Boyle for being my co-host. Thanks to Martin Camargo, Jordan Loveridge, and Marjorie Woods for offering their insights. Thanks to the Digital Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin for supporting this project. And, finally, thanks to Eric Detweiler and Caddie Alford for helping us to improve the format for this and all the other sonic rhetoric reviews. We dedicate this first episode to Marjorie Woods, whose scholarly career has proven that academic work can be both erudite and enjoyable.