The Scholarship of Teaching the Early Modern: An Overview

Abstract

The original objective of this overview was rather simple. I would read a body of material devoted to teaching the early modern period, primarily as it pertained to English and French courses in higher education, with two aims in mind: firstly, to provide useful bibliographical information on the topic, and secondly, to present a synthesis of the key ideas in circulation concerning the perceived challenges involved in teaching the early modern period and the proposed solutions to those challenges. This would then serve implicitly to contextualize the approaches and principles highlighted in the contributions brought together in the current volume. The first aim proved realizable: various bibliographical searches brought to my attention a considerable body of literature (albeit certainly not a vast one, particularly if one excludes the studies devoted to the teaching of Shakespeare) that I was able to sift through, and attempt to evaluate. The second aim proved more illusory as it became quickly apparent that while much material was devoted to theorizing approaches (pedagogical and interpretative) to specific works published in the early modern period, very little came to my attention that analysed the broader concerns raised by teaching the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.