Femina: Female Roots of "Foreign" Language Teaching and the Rise of Mother-Tongue Ideologies

Abstract

The article begins with an illuminating and influential example from one of the peaks of nationalistic monolingualism and mother-tongue ideologies: the representation by Bertha Pappenheim (Joseph Breuer's Jewish-Austrian patient Anna O.) of her escape into "foreign" languages; and Pappenheim's basic role in the development of the psychoanalytic method, especially the "talking cure." The article argues that although, by contrast, the Middle Ages is an era predating the nation-state with its national language, it is the period that established the concept of the mother-tongue. In medieval Europe, due to common bi- or plurilingualism, mothers and other women in a household were often the basic teachers not only of a child's first language but also of a child's second one. This is the context in which Walter of Bibbesworth's Tretiz/Femina must be viewed—the central "apryse de fraunceys" of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England. While Femina represents one of the earliest and most important materials for the teaching of a vernacular in Europe, its later adaptation, Femina nova, is among the earliest "foreign"-language schoolbooks.