12 - Mitchell & Robinson’s Medievalism: Echoes of Empire in the History of Old English Pedagogy

Summary

In the Foreword to his 1965 first edition of A Guide to Old English, Bruce Mitchell explains that Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Anglo-Saxon Reader (alongside Alistair Campbell’s Old English Grammar) are two of three textbooks that have ‘been my almost daily companions in the class-room and study.’ He declares that ‘they have so influenced my teaching and my thinking that echoes of them cannot fail to appear in my work’ and continues: ‘while hoping that the echoes are not so strong that they deafen my own voice completely, I acknowledge my debt to them humbly, gratefully, and sincerely.’ Mitchell’s (and, later, his co-author Robinson’s) indebtedness to the Victorian Sweet, especially, endures across all eight editions of the Guide as it expands from a slim 160 pages in 1965 to a hefty 400+ as of its most recent, 2012, eighth edition. Thus, Mitchell & Robinson’s relationship to Sweet evidences a tight connection between late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth-century understandings of Old English language and language-learning pedagogy that continues into the present day.

This chapter examines the influences of Sweet’s Primer and Reader on Mitchell & Robinson’s Guide, arguing that in Sweet’s textbooks Old English is subjected to a Victorian medievalism that has significant afterlives not only in mid-twentieth-century Old English textbooks but also in ones of the present day. We first explore the educational, cultural, and intellectual values of Sweet and the colonial moment in which he lived, which are encoded in his textbook architecture. Specifically, we discuss the principles that guide Sweet’s treatment of phonology and his emendation and organisational practices, arguing that these are undergirded by British ideologies of empire. Mitchell & Robinson’s Guide, which openly acknowledges its debts to Sweet, necessarily if unconsciously folds both Sweet’s pedagogy and colonial ideology into itself. Thus, Mitchell & Robinson’s Guide presents an Old English that is medieval and medievalism. In the Guide, Old English is an artifact of early medieval England and of the English language but, also, in the hands of Sweet and his inheritors, it is a mediated and modern product that has been efficiently ‘normalized’, to use Sweet’s term.