Women in the History of Language Learning and Teaching

Hidden Pioneers of Practice from Europe and Beyond (1400-2000)

Sabine Doff, Giovanni Iamartino, Rachel Mairs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040796405
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Mujeres en la historia

This volume addresses the historical neglect of women's contributions to language learning and teaching. While the historiography of language education has often focused on male-dominated frameworks, overlooking the pivotal roles women have played, the case studies in this book highlight female pioneers in language education across various cultural and linguistic traditions, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Covering a wide range of languages – including Greek, Arabic, French, and English – and exploring the gendered dimensions of language education, where social class and gender influence both the languages taught and the methods employed, the book reveals women's agency in shaping language education – and the systematic undervaluing of their contributions. In doing so, it calls for a broader, more inclusive historiography that recognises women's significant impact on the field, often in non-institutional and domestic contexts, and a reconsideration of the history of language education to acknowledge the contributions of women globally.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Researching women as teachers and learners of languages: An introduction
• 1. French lessons in late-medieval England: The role of women
• 2. ‘Lend me your apt ears in silence’: Ippolita Maria Sforza in Bonino Mombrizio's verse grammar of Greek (ca. 1465)
• 3. Learning languages for marriage : The linguistic experience of aristocratic women in early modern Europe
• 4. The role of women in reflection on French grammar and the teaching of the French language
• 5. Gender in language learning and teaching in eighteenth-century Paris : A socio-historical view
• 6. Young Hetty Thrale and her master of languages : Learning Italian between fiction and real life in eighteenthcentury England
• 7. Teaching living languages as political statement : Female teachers in nineteenth-century Germany
• 8. Teaching French at the first municipal higher girls' schools in Bohemia (1860s to 1870s)
• 9. Writing a gendered history of English language teaching in Italy, 1861–1922
• 10. Female English language teachers and learners at the University of London Holiday Course 1906–1955
• 11. Singara Devi Chenapa – Mersha Chinnappa: Investigating a female author of a military Arabic phrasebook
• 12. ‘A day’s work at washing’ : A corpus-based analysis of female-authored English teaching manuals for immigrants in the Americanisation era
• 13. Women's role in promoting English culture through English-language school education in Poland (first half of the twentieth century)
• 14. Nuns teaching German in twentiethcentury Milan : The Deutsche Schule Istituto Giulia
• Index