What Love Makes Possible:

Transformation and Education in John Lyly’s Galatea

Elizabeth Mathie

In the sixteenth century, English humanist pedagogues began recommending love as a useful tool for ensuring dutiful obedience and spurring an independent will to labor in students. Cultivating love of master, subject, and study alike in schoolboys was presented by these authors as a pragmatic strategy that could simultaneously guarantee student success and maintain hierarchical order within the classroom. This talk, based on a forthcoming article, considers how John Lyly’s 1584 school-boy troupe drama, Galatea, troubles those optimistic prescriptions. It contends that Lyly’s pedagogical drama shows how the recommended loving engagements of pupils, while effective for encouraging student labor, also dangerously authorize them to affirm their own masters and systems of value rather than those espoused by a patriarchal humanist tradition. While Lyly’s Galatea has usually been read for what it can show us about the potentials and limits of early modern English conceptions of gender and sexuality, this paper makes the case for its relevance to the pedagogical theory of the period.

The Speaker：Elizabeth Mathie

Postdoctoral fellow in the Tsinghua-Michigan Society of Fellows, housed in the Institute for World Literatures and Cultures and the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on representations of training (of both animals and humans) in early modern England, especially in instructional manuals and on the stage. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in August 2017 and began work at Tsinghua in late October.