Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Ideas in Context)
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This book examines ideals of classical learning in order to make a significant and provocative contribution to current and past discussions on the role of education in society--why we teach and learn what we do. Essays by classicists, historians, philosophers and literary scholars argue for seeing the history of ancient education as an aspect of political theory and history, the figure of the teacher and of the student being inevitably implicated in various structures of intellectual, social and political authority.
1930), pp. 261-72, and the diverging interpretations of G. W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (London, 1978), pp. 83-5 and P. Athanassiadi-Fowden, Julian and Hellenism. An Intellectual Biography (London, 1992, 2nd ed.), pp. 1-12. 12 On the religious and intellectual relation between pagans and Christians during the first centuries of the Christian era, see, for example, P. Brown, The Making ofLate Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 1978) and P. Chuvin, The Chronicle of the Last Pagans, tr. B. A. Archer
neglecting the design and sense of the author, has confined himself solely to the pursuit of new words and phrases, different readings, and omissions of accent!12 Plato's dialogues thus became a trope both for argument and authority in argument. For Dacier, Plato's plain and simple discourse was to be defended as natural, not as some critics claimed, vulgar and trivial. The philosopher 'who is scarce ever to be found out of shops, who talks only of Husbandmen, Smiths, Masons, Carpenters,
not be discountable: 'and suppose the French were as much in the right as I know them to be in the wrong; what does that argue for usT Producing no evidence for his knowledge, he shifts the burden of proving relevance onto Tom. Jack is sometimes emphatic: cNo, Tom, no', and refuses to accept the terms of revolutionary discourse, garbled by Tom into 'hard words' like 'organization andjunction, and civism\ These he denounces as 'nonsense, gibberish, downright hocus-pocus'.30 When Tom accuses the
vaunts with praise for another, And Belgia sings of three Annas in our own time. Whoever wishes, may praise the ages and times past; Our own times give me their own Annas. It is right to add three to the Muses, and there will not nine be as before; But twelve, in the company that makes up the Muses' chorus. What Annas will envious Spain set against ours? Whom will Italy, or learned France give that are similar? Or any nation lying anywhere under the sun which is famous For glory, for scholarship
known, aspiration to authorship was generally (though not invariably) understood to preclude the possibility of marriage. A female scholar was expected to be a virgin. Her position was understood by male contemporaries as that of a Sibyl or a Muse rather than a co-worker. This is clearly illustrated by the biographies of the sisters Isotta and Ginevra Nogarola. Isotta Nogarola remained in the world, but as a spinster, a situation which caused her a great deal of difficulty. She seems to have