Latin & the Canon: In conversation with… Skye Shirley
Today’s article takes the form of a conversation with Skye, sharing some practical tips for challenging the canon whilst teaching the canon, tools for questioning textbooks and empowering students to do the same. Skye is a language activist, teacher-researcher and also the founder of Lupercal — a Latin reading group closing the gender gap in the field of Latin studies.
What made you first start thinking about ‘the Canon’ as a Latin teacher?
I definitely was curious about what makes something a ‘canon’ as a student, then once I became a teacher I got my first job at an all girls’ school. It just felt really wrong that our textbook depicted women as essentially objects. The first sentence was something like “good girls carry water” but boys were climbing trees, having fun, and sailing. I knew that there was this whole other life to women behind those pages.
Sure, women had restrictions that boys didn’t at the time but surely women did more than just carry water? I wanted some of that to be honoured and the more I learnt, the more I was realising how much of an omission that was. There were women who were shopkeepers and gladiators. Women who immigrated and integrated into Roman society. Women who fought against the incorporation of Roman values in all parts of the Roman empire. Roman involved in political life, sometimes through their husbands but sometimes as their own agents. The gaps started seeming more and more egregious to me, and now I’m finally doing something about it!
How do you think teaching the Canon impacts students’ perceptions (or understanding) of Latin as a language?
I think it absolutely impacts students perceptions of Latin as a language. This is really clear because a lot of students come to my classes on Women Writing Latin wanting to know if they’re prepared enough, if the Latin level is too hard or too easy. And what they’re often surprised to find out is that, no matter how experienced you are with Latin, women’s Latin does at first glance seem harder. It’s not necessarily any harder, but you’re not taught the vocabulary that articulates women’s experiences.
For example there’s an ongoing joke (like this one, below), that I’ve definitely participated in, which makes people laugh but it’s also got a more sinister side to it. It’s also a joke that has blind spots to the misogyny, that is inherent in that fact that we don’t need 20 words for ‘to kill’ unless we are reading a text about war.
If we read instead a text about something else we would find that a different vocabulary was useful and required. The result of backwards planning and basically saying that we want to prepare Latin students to eventually read (and take exams on) Virgil, is that it trickles down to the very beginning stages of Latin 1 and cuts out women’s experiences and it creates a bigger gap between the Latin students know and the Latin women wrote.
What advice would you give Latin teachers who want to start challenging the canon in their classroom?
I think there is a common misconception that Latin teachers need to change the texts or textbooks that they’re using in order to challenge the canon in their classroom. Of course, all of those thing are favourable and will do an incredible amount of work to widen the spectrum of voices that we hear in Latin classrooms and to widen the accessibility of Latin to all out students. It’s also definitely helpful to question the canon whilst teaching the canon.
So, for example, I would often ask pre-reading questions by using an image or something that comes before the text we’re reading in class to get students thinking about it. I would always ask “quis est in pictura?” “ubi sumus?” etc and I started to make a point of always asking “quae est in pictura?” Because almost never did we have an answer for “quae est in pictura?”. So often the only people in those images were men. So, even if the answer to those questions was always “no” or “nulla est femina in pictura”: I felt that this was still an important thing for me to notice. That it was a “utopian exclusion” perhaps, of women, from Roman life or certainly from important Roman conversations that students read about in class.
Another thing that’s really important is having tools to be able to discuss these things. For example, getting an active vocabulary of feminist, anti-racist and queer theory and basically finding ways to use those terms in the classroom so that students feel comfortable using them themselves.
Another thing you could do is: If you’re teaching a passage from the Aeneid and it’s about Camilla, the Amazon, you could also then look at Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’ (Mexico City, 1648–1695) Latin passage on Camilla and how her name changed. So, you can still find ways to continually deepen the conversation, whilst sticking to the requirements of the curriculum.
What change would you like to see in the way Classics is taught in the future, on a broader scale?
My biggest wish is that it is taught as “Latin” and “Greek” or “Archaeology” if people prefer to have it that way. Because I see that my own research into 17th century women Latinists could only have taken place in institutions or universities which had a Latin department which is not called a Classics department. So, it is no coincidence that I have ended up at University College London, because it is one of only three (that I know of) in the world where you can get your PhD in just Latin. I think that is essential because it means all of Latin history and it owns the ancient identity of Latin without defining it as an ancient language. And I think that is really important because as long as Latin is seen as an ancient language. It is always going to be white. It is always going to be male. It is always going to be elite. And honestly, it is largely overstudied in some areas and critically neglected in others.
… and how could we help make change happen?
If you’re a teacher and you have any power in the renaming of your department I would definitely recommend switching it from Classics to Latin studies. If you’re interested in Latin, especially if you’re at school, I think that you can also validate the interdisciplinary nature of a lot of these questions and texts, by making sure that you do stand at the culmination of multiple fields.
If you’re curious about how textbooks get made, how people interact with our field, how in-fighting happens and basically how standardised tests can be essentially racist and classist structures, then there are majors for that in college and there are research opportunities to undertake. These things are part of Latin studies as well. You could, for example, study a community of Latin speakers and understand the questions that they are asking each other. You could study how groups of people interact with texts, such as the Aeneid in prisons, and address that from a sociological perspective.
There are plenty of ways that we can amplify the parts of Classics that really shouldn’t be seen as marginal and yet they are by nature marginal because the world of Classics has been defined so narrowly.
Finally… Some resources for those who want to find out more?
Skye recommends:
- Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing is absolutely essential reading.
- Women Latin Poets by Jane Stevenson is eye-opening.
- Attending webinars and lectures is important.
On Classics Abroad 2021 Online, Skye will be leading two sessions: Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris and Florence-based Women Latinists.
Join us this summer Monday 26th — Friday 30th July 2021 as we explore classical antiquity and the city of Florence. This year, the theme is ‘Challenge the Canon’. Apply here.
