The Grammar of Pain in Aelfric Bata's Colloquies

Abstract

The eleventh-century Latin Colloquies of Ælfric Bata have received scant critical attention, much of it dismissive. Aside from Bata's faulty Latin, critics have worried about the violence and other irregularities depicted in the daily scenes of the dialogues, and he has generally been viewed as a rogue figure. I argue here that Bata's work exhibits an awareness of the nuances of authority in second-language teaching, its implications for the student, and the ways that a language of power can be manipulated and subverted. Bata's predecessor, Ælfric of Eynsham, suggests a productive relationship between pain and language teaching. Bata, however, shows boys using imagined pain and humour both to fix language in the memory and to create a space for themselves outside the authority of wisdom texts.

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