Debating with Demons: Pedagogy and Materiality in Early English Literature

In early English literature ca 700-1000 C.E., demons are represented as teachers who use methods of persuasion and argumentation to influence their "pupils". By deploying these methods, related to the liberal arts of rhetoric and dialectic, demons become masters of verbal manipulation. Their pupils are frequently women or Jews, seemingly marginal figures but who often oppose the authority of demonic pedagogues and challenge their deceptive lessons. In poetic accounts of the Fall of the Angels, the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the lives of the saints, those who debate with demons redefine the significance of narrative, authority, and resistance in early medieval pedagogy. This book argues that by initiating pedagogical encounters, demonic teachers also affect their students materially and spiritually. Such encounters are both epistemological, altering the pupils' knowledge, and ontological, affecting their state of being. As the pupils "learn", the physical places they occupy align with conceptual spaces in the mind. This results in transformations that are at once intellectual, spatial, and spiritual, integrating minds, souls, bodies, and places into cohesive experience. The author shows how narratives about such transformations represent pedagogy as a spirituo-material practice, both embodied and emplaced, with the potential to alter the onto-epistemological dynamics of the world. CHRISTINA M. HECKMAN is Professor of English at Augusta University, Georgia.