We’re excited to share a special guest episode today from our colleagues at HEQ&A, the official podcast of History of Education Quarterly. They have an outstanding archive of episodes, but given the interdisciplinary focus of this season, today I thought we’d share an interview they did with Sarah Lynch, where she discusses her most recent article, Marking Time: Making Community in Medieval Schools. Her work embraces methods from sociology and anthropology and is a really interesting look at the temporal frameworks of education.
Dr Sarah Lynch is a historian of medieval education in France, focusing on the socio-economic context of schools, pupils, and teachers, as well as the significance of such instruction within local cultures and communities. Her research revolves around elementary and grammar education in the medieval world and her current projects centre on educational legacies in late-medieval French wills, education in the global Middle Ages, and the medieval year.
Episode Transcript
Michael Donnay
I’m still on vacation this week, so in place of our usual Passing Notes episode, we’ve got a special guest appearance from our colleagues at the History of Education Society in the US and their podcast, HEQ&A.
I’ve really enjoyed listening to HEQ&A, which is the official podcast of their journal, History of Education Quarterly. They have an outstanding archive of episodes, but given the interdisciplinary focus of this season, today I thought we’d share an interview they did with Sarah Lynch. Sarah is a historian of medieval schooling and in the episode she discusses her most recent article, Marking Time: Making Community in Medieval Schools. Her work embraces methods from sociology and anthropology and is a really interesting look at the temporal frameworks of education.
If you like what you hear today, you can find more episodes of HEQ&A on Stitcher, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out more of the US History of Education Society’s work on their website, historyofeducation.org, and by following them on Twitter @HistEdUSA.
I really enjoyed listening to Sarah discuss her research and I hope you do too!
Jack Schneider: Welcome to HEQ&A, the podcast of the History of Education Quarterly. I’m your host, HEQ co-editor Jack Schneider. Every few weeks, we’ll dive into recent work from the journal, asking authors how their projects challenge or extend what we know about a topic, exploring what’s interesting and surprising about it, and then taking a step back to consider broader implications. In the second half of the show, we turn our sights to teaching. So, if you’re an educator, make sure to stick around until the end. And now let’s hear from one of our authors.
Sarah Lynch
Well, hello. My name is Sarah Lynch. I’m an assistant professor of history at Angelo State University in Texas. And I’m the author of Marking Time: Making Community in Medieval Schools. Well, simply put my article is about what the later medieval school day and school year looked like. It also looks at why the school day/school year was organized in various ways. And that’s not just the practical influences like the influences seasons and so on and so forth, but also at how these formats helped create a sense of community and identity among children and youth. So really, it’s how the school year as a format, as a structure, helped the people kind of get more education than you would even think. Just like learning. It’s also a way of constructing identity and community belonging. There has been a good bit of work done on, on conceptions of time in history and how those change. And so if that goes right the way back to the 1960s, so you have scholars like Jacques Le Goff, E.P. Thompson, and more recently Gerhardt Dohrn-van Rossum and Avner Wishnitzer who kind of grappled with the idea that time is a construct and that humans are actually aware of this, like human societies are aware of this. And so they employ that knowledge in various ways to shape their societies as it were. So this article what it does is it marries that approach with the idea of making and defining communities.
And there has been a lot of work done on making communities. In, in the Middle Ages in particular, that’s a really big subject of study in medieval studies. So basically how constructing experiences of time shapes community. But of course I’m a historian of medieval education, so I wanted to use that those approaches kind of meld them together to examine how education contributed to the socialization efforts of medieval communities. To be honest, I was actually inspired by the work of Ibn Khaldun, he’s actually a 14th century North African scholar who has, who kind of formulated this idea called Asabiyyah and Asabiyyah is usually translated–though there’s a whole argument over that translation, of course–Asabiyyah is usually translated as “group feeling.”
And so my work explores how time and these temporal cultures helped create this sense of group feeling within the community, be that the local school community itself [so within the school], um, the local community. In other words, the town, or kind of more broader ideas of community or as I put it here, supranational communities, such as the church, Christendom, these ideas that were very important in the Middle Ages.
Anything about medical education and especially elementary and grammar education. That’s kind of surprising for a lot of people cause they’re like, wait, what? They had education back then. But I think what’s interesting about my work is that communities
and school authorities, be that local town councils or local churches or whatever, use a lot of different tactics to acculturate pupils and students.
So they’re not just acculturating them by the materials they used in the classroom. They’re not just a culturation them by controlling who could teach and so on and so forth. What they’re creating are kinds of immersive experiences. And I also think my work acknowledges that people in the past often employed fun and even controlled chaos in a conscious way.
Like for example, in a lot of the Carnival kind of things that are like part of wider community practices and they actually ingrained them in the school year. And so, because they acknowledged that especially younger people needed a kind of outlet, they needed a pressure about. I think nowadays we’re really locked into this idea that how we experience time is set, that it cannot be changed. And for those of us working in education or study education, that’s especially a case it’s like, you must do this, we must do X at Y time, et cetera, et cetera. But the more we understand how we experience time as a construct, well, that might allow us to approach our daily lives in a more flexible way, and that we might be willing to look at other temporal cultures.
There’s this whole argument, and some of it is very problematic, about how quote unquote Western cultures–I go into it in the article–use clock time and non-Western cultures use event time or task time. But ultimately I think a lot of this reminds us that we should be pivoting back towards that kind of event or task time.
What we get done is more important than the time we take doing it. Um, and if anything, the current pandemic with its lockdowns and working remotely and so on and so forth has really made this very real for people. But the way we experienced times with constructs, I’m just thinking so many people have been saying how, oh, they couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. And so, and so forth. So our temporal cultures were dissolved and it’s especially pointed for us in education. And so it’s, it’s really clear that many people need a temporal framework in which to function, but we also should be more willing to make adjustment to that framework. So that works best for us works best for the communities we live in and so on so forth.
Jack Schneider
The second half of the show is dedicated to thinking about teaching. We ask authors to put on their guest lecturer hats and take students into the weeds. What should they pay attention to, methodologically speaking? What else should they be reading if they want to take a deep dive into the historiography? And where are there opportunities for further research?
Sarah Lynch
So I think this article is valued because it looks at a wide range of methodologies. I come from a very interdisciplinary based background, and I think that’s really important to embrace methodologies from sociology and anthropology, and also from a wide range in terms of chronology as well. So I use everything from scholarship on temporal culture in late 19th century Ottoman Empire to the enormous, simply enormous, body of scholarship on medieval community practices to personal accounts of
people traveling into quote unquote different temporal cultures in the 20th century. And so it’s good to remind us not to restrict ourselves as students of history.
I also think this is a good article to come at education in the Middle Ages for beginners. Students are of course familiar with timetables and academic calendars, et cetera. We are all in temporal frameworks–we’re all in temporal cultures ourselves, even if we don’t necessarily think about it. And so this article shows that medical school children had comparative structures in their lives. I also brought in some of the festivals that were associated with schools in the Middle Ages. And so there’s a whole load of festivals I mentioned. I mentioned Bishop festivals and some of the crazy festivals around, you know, Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Carnival. And I think students might find it useful to reflect on annual events. In, for example, the modern North American schools, such as homecoming, as socialization efforts. But I do think the Middle Ages has an edge on homecoming because they literally had still sanctioned gambling and cockfights. So, yeah.
So I could go on about this for a long time, but there’s some good works to get started on. I can split these into two groups, one on like temporal culture and another on medieval education. For example, on temporal culture, I would recommend the following: Judith Bennett’s A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of the English Peasants Before the Plague. This is actually great because it’s a, it’s a year in the life. It’s very well- researched okay, because Judith Bennett, very important historian, but she’s talked about it in this very interesting flow of personal experience throughout the year. And it’s, I think a very valuable book to get you into the frame, the mental framework of the medieval year.
And then there’s Gerhardt Dohrn-van Rossum’s History of the Hour Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. And that’s just a fantastic introduction to how we shaped time– how we shaped, at least, our experience of time. Then we have Ronald Hutton’s Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. And firstly, that’s a reasonably priced paperback. So that’s always exciting, but it has this amazingly wide chronological range that allows the reader to understand these changes across time and how festivals and rituals are used for various reasons, throughout centuries and they might be neglected for a few centuries and then brought back usually for sometimes for reasons of nostalgia, but often really for socialization efforts too, and finally Avner Wishnitzer’s Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire, which delves into how the state actually began to formulate a temporal culture.
So these are all great works on temporal cultures and how time is pliable. Okay. It’s mainly about that since I’m here, I have to do shout-out for works on medieval/Renaissance education because even university works on university education, but especially works on elementary and grammar, in the medieval and Renaissance periods are all, because for some reason, elementary and grammar education and the study of that, is viewed with disdain which is ridiculous because you’re looking at the underpinning of all intellectual activity. And another great thing, if I’m looking at elementary and grammar education, Middle Ages and the Renaissance, is that it gives you interesting glimpse into medieval socialization practices.
So I would recommend–there’s a whole load of people out there. I would look at Grendler, Gale, Black. They work mostly on Italy, especially in the Renaissance period, early Renaissance period. Orme and Moore and Cruz for England. Williamson works mostly on the Netherlands and she’s particularly good for material culture of education.
I myself also have an open access, so a free–that’s always exciting–mini monograph called Medieval Pedagogical Writings: An Epitome. And that’s a handy intro to what medieval commentators thought education should be. Well, I think there’s a lot of scope for future research. Uh, this article is actually part of a larger project of mine on the medieval years, so at some stage that will emerge. But work really needs to be done, though–I touch on it in the article a little bit, well, that was constrained by how to make this a more cohesive work–but work really needs to be done on Jewish and Islamic temporal practices in education in the Middle Ages. I, it a lot more, and there’s some really interesting stuff out there, but more work needs to be done on it.
I also think a lot more work should be done on temporal cultures and non-formal or other, not school-based education and trade, all right. So for example, how temporal culture interacts with apprenticeship. You know, how do apprentices engage in temporal cultures. And that’s particularly interesting because if you look at pre-modern and early modern apprenticeship contracts, they tend to be of course, very much, a bout time. You know, it’s seven years, it’s five years and those things change around a little bit. So I think a lot of work to be done there. And a lot of work to be done on kind of like non-formal education, such as training in monasteries that isn’t explicitly about training in the classroom
Jack Schneider
Check out History of Education Quarterly online. The journal is published by Cambridge University Press and it’s carried by most academic libraries. You should also be sure to follow HEQ Twitter handle: @histedquarterly, which regularly sends out free read-only versions of articles, and the show’s Twitter handle @HEQandA. And don’t forget, subscribe to the show so you don’t miss forthcoming episodes. We’re available on iTunes, Stitcher, and wherever you get your podcasts. HEQ&A is produced at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Our producer is Jennifer Berkshire and our theme music is by Ryan Shaw. I’m Jack Schneider. Thanks for joining us.
Michael Donnay
Passing Notes is a production of the History of Education Society UK. Our social media manager is Elena Rossi, and our executive producer is Heather Ellis. This episode was written and produced by me Michael Donnay. You can find a transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk.