"Gladly would he lerne and gladly teche" 1
Selections from a Catalog
"Gladly would he lerne and gladly teche," the final line of "The Prologue" of Chaucer's popular Canterbury Tales, describes Chaucer's ideal teacher, the Clerk of Oxford, and is frequently cited by delighted educators as a universal ideal of an entire profession. For that reason, I borrow the image and line as a title for an exhibition which was held in Special Collections and Rare Books on the fourth floor of Wilson Library, at the University of Minnesota from March 1 to April 15, 1997.
This exhibition features selections of verbal representations in Occidental didactic poems and other poetry depicting educational themes compiled in a catalog for an M.A. Plan B project under the advisorship of Professor Ayers Bagley, in the Department of Educational Policy and Administration, at the University of Minnesota. The catalog is currently undergoing the final stages of completion.
Two principal ideas lie at the heart of the project and exhibition. First, is the Horatian concept of 'ut pictura poesis,' or, 'as is poetry so is painting,' based on Simonides of Ceos' idea of 'poetry as a speaking picture.'2 Second, are the didactic origins of purpose shared by poetic, historic, and philosophic discourse. History and poetry are usually distinguished in terms of poetry as fiction and history as fact. However, as much evidence exists to dispute the notion of poetry as purely a purveyor of fiction devoid of didactic purpose as there is to support the notion of history as a series of fictionally constructed narratives biased by individual cultural identity and experience.
One of the earliest theoretical discussions of this problem traces back to Aristotle's Poetics. For Aristotle, the poet and the historian differ not so much in the writing of verse or prose, but in the distinction that poetry relates what may happen, while history relates what has happened. Poetry is, therefore, more philosophical and higher than history. Poetry expresses the universal while history expresses the particular or actual.3
The Catalog
Over a thousand short poems and excerpts from longer texts and works of epic proportions have been compiled into a catalog of poetry depicting educational themes. These have been identified through several methods. The primary method has been to identify a set of keywords, for example, student or teacher, and then using these keywords to search poetry indices in both book and electronic form by subject, title, and first line.4 Once a poem is identified each is located in an anthology or other primary or secondary source, gathered, photocopied, added to the physical catalog, and added to the electronic database. These poems have been amassed from literally hundreds of different anthologies and collected works. A second search was conducted of educational documents5, and a selection of source materials identified through references in history of education textbooks, and a third search was conducted by systematically (alphabetically) searching the Reader's Encyclopedia to identify and isolate works of a didactic nature, or those illustrative of educational themes and motifs. Numerous bibliographies and lists of themes and motifs have been compiled, along with background information on authors and their works. The final stage is indexing and classifying the poems into eight categories by title and first line. Exceptional works, or those that relate to a particular subject yet fall outside of the title and first line classification, are identified as such.
The methodological approach used in compiling the catalog and the exhibition is education iconography, or, the study of the imagery of education, primarily focused upon the first of three stages, that is, the identification of themes and motifs.6 Iconographic analysis is a method or tool, an aid to assist in uncovering and revealing the symbolic or hidden subject matter in art, in this case, the art or imagery of poetry wherein lies the signification of themes of education.7 Erwin Panofsky identified the three stages of iconographic analysis as 1) primary or natural subject matter, 2) secondary or conventional subject matter, and 3) intrinsic meaning or content.
The Exhibition
Any attempt to present a survey of a given topic or event over the course of several thousand years is greatly limited by space, and what is included and excluded becomes chiefly a matter of selection and personal choice. This exhibition is an attempt at portraying a chronological survey of Occidental history of education through the imagery of poetry from antiquity to the present. Showcased in six glass and chrome enclosures in the gallery shared by Special Collections and Rare Books and the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, numerous anthologies, electronic databases Granger's Poetry Index and Roth's Poetry Annual, and other reference works such as the National Biography, Reader's Encyclopedia, and massive numbers of journal articles and books have been consulted. These sources have been heavily relied upon for biographical background material for the exhibition, and the electronic catalog LUMINA and card catalog records provide important information about the history of specific books and editions.
Case I focuses on mythical images, values, ethics, and ideals depicted in Homeric Education: The Iliad and the Odyssey.
Case II focuses on the curriculum of Greek education. The work of Sappho is used as an exemplar for female education, the curriculum consisting of music, dance, and athletics, and the various Odes of Pindar exemplify the synthesis of the cultivation of the mind with the body in athletic and poetic contests and competition. A poem by Bion translated as "The Teacher" depicts a popular mythological theme represented in verbal and visual media, the Education of Cupid, (Love, Eros).
Case III focuses upon Roman education, and placing image and text side by side, brings into the public eye several illustrated editions of Juvenal's Satires VII and XIV, Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses, and Martial's "To a Schoolmaster." Educational themes include instructions for parents who serve as examples to their children, virtue and vice, or, positive and negative example as lessons, the inculcation of proper habits, the use of corporal punishment in the schools, and depictions of relationships between students and teachers, for example, wise Cheiron the Centaur instructing the famous Achilles.
Case IV explores medieval education, especially schools and university influences. Emphasis is on Chaucer's character of the Clerk, and his depiction of the song school. Also represented in this case are the less noble aspects of education and students' attitudes away from study, turned towards drinking, gaming, and carousing, in works from the Carmina Burana.
Case V depicts Renaissance education, and focuses primarily upon emblems and the courtesy and civility literature.
Case VI Romantic Education examines educational themes in the works by Blake, Wordsworth, and Longfellow. Primary themes include a representation of the schoolboy, and the Platonic doctrine of recollection.
Footnotes (click on the footnote number to return to the text)
[1] Anglo-Saxon spellings "lerne" and "teche" have been retained rather than modernizing to "learn" and "teach."
[2] For further study of the notions of 'ut pictura poesis' see John Graham, "Ut pictura poesis," The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies in Pivotal Ideas; Rensselaer W. Lee, "Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting," Art Bulletin 22 (1940); Cicely Davies, "Ut pictura poesis," Modern Language Review 30 (1935); Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (1970); Wesley Trimpi, "The Meaning of Horace's Ut pictura poesis," Journal of Warburg and Courtald Institutes 36 (1973)1-34; Ann Hurley and Kate Greenspan. So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies. Lewisburg, PA, 1995; Eugene Huddleston, The Relationship of Painting and Literature. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978.
[3] See Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Alex Preminger (1974) for an excellent discussion and summary of the relationship and distinctions of poetry and history.
[4] The initial search was conducted manually on Granger's Index to Poetry (3rd, 4th, 5th, and 8th editions). Soon after this was completed the Granger's Index to Poetry came out on CD-ROM. A new search was conducted electronically and cross-checked against the manual searches. The project was put on hold during a 1993-1994 academic year spent studying literature and critical theory at the Centre Parisien d'Etudes Critiques in Paris. Upon returning to the United States it was discovered that a revised edition of the Granger's Index to Poetry had been issued. This was consulted, as was a new product that appeared on the market, the CD-ROM version of Roth's Poetry Annual. Several other poetry indices were searched including multiple editions of the Index to Poetry for Children and Young People.
[5] Themes and motifs in education iconography are based on the work in the visual arts by Professor Ayers Bagley, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Education Policy and Administration, University of Minnesota. His three catalogs, produced for the Education Iconography Project, include Education Imagery in Ancient Greece: a selective catalogue of education iconography in the figurative arts of ancient Greece, 6th to 1st centuries B.C. (1977), Education Imagery in the Art of the West: Middle Ages, a selective catalogue of education iconography in the figurative arts of western societies, 5th through 14th centuries (1976-1978), and Education Imagery in the Art of the West: Modern Era, a selective catalogue of education iconography in the figurative arts of western societies, 15th to the 19th centuries (1977). Additional useful sources are F.A.G. Beck, Album of Greek Education: The Greeks at School and Play. Sydney: Cheiron Press, 1976; F.A.G. Beck, Greek Education: 450-350 B.C. London: Methuen, 1964; F.A.G. Beck, Bibliography of Greek Education and related topics. Sydney: Cheiron Press, 1986; Werner Jaeger. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. Volumes I-III. Translated from the German by Gilbert Highet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965 (1939); and James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. New York: Icon Editions, 1974
[6] Samuel Popper makes a convincing argument for the use of the art object as an historic record in Pathways to the Humanities in School Administration (1985, 71). Popper cites Jacob Burkhardt, a nineteenth-century Swiss historian at Basel University as 'the first to include in disciplined scholarship works of art as a usable record of the past,' thereby laying the foundation for scholarship in the social history of art. His successor, Heinrich Wolfflin, took it one step further in locating the work of art as 'a communication whose style could be subjected to disciplined analysis for hidden historical information.' Erwin Panofsky and other German art historians furthered the groundwork for identifying art objects as valid historical documents whose textual and contextual references can be established by disciplined analysis. For further research on the iconographic approach see these works by Erwin Panofsky: Idea; a Concept in Art Theory. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968; Symbols in Transformation: Iconographic Themes at the Time of the Reformation. Princeton, NJ: 1969; Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Harper and Row, 1972; Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; Lavin, Irving (ed.). Meaning in the visual arts: views from the outside; a centennial commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; and Greene, Theodore (ed.). Meaning in the Humanities: Five Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1938.
[7] See also Robert Glaser, "Concept Learning and Concept Teaching," Learning Research and School Subjects (1968); and Henri van de Waal, Iconclass: An Iconographic Classification System. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1973-1985
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