From Literacy to Literature: Elementary Learning and the Middle English Poet

Abstract

Literary practice may be more deeply shaped by basic literacy training than we have noticed. This is particularly true for English writers of the late fourteenth century, when the constant movement out of Latin into English in schoolrooms both ensured that translation exercises became a method for making vernacular poetry and demonstrated that English had a grammar of its own. As the most basic grammatical concepts and the simplest exercises of literacy training evolved into resources for literary technique, the style of writers such as Chaucer, Langland, and Gower became “grammaticalized.” For this reason, a more detailed understanding of the forms of pedagogy employed in grammar schools can be equivalent to a genealogy of the important elements of a style.