Teaching Europe French: the worlds and words of Claude Mauger

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Claude Mauger is a largely forgotten figure today, but he was the most influential French teacher in seventeenth-century England, and his work achieved lasting success in print in England and on the continent. This article offers a new account of his career in person and in print, arguing that this standard-bearer for the prestige of French himself lived a more precarious life, and that his influence stretched throughout Europe and North America and touched languages from English and German to Italian and Arabic. It reconstructs Mauger’s networks, including previously undiscussed manuscript material. And it surveys many of the surviving copies of Mauger’s works across three continents to ask who read him, where, and how. The study of this one teacher has significant implications for how we think about the teaching and learning of languages, the labour involved, and multilingual reading more broadly.