Learning to Talk Shop : Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England

A new account of premodern education that offered non-elite readers lessons in navigating the premodern marketplaceLearning to Talk Shop explores the phrasebooks and guides to conversations that flooded the marketplace in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, making a virtual classroom available to an audience who could not afford or did not have access to formal education.Privileging market share and mercantile savvy over moral instruction and linguistic mastery, these mischievous little books offered readers lessons in the pragmatic, and murky, ethics of the premodern marketplace, teaching them bargaining tactics, insults, pick up lines, and strategies for welching on debts. Revealing what happens when language learning itself undergoes a translation out of the classroom, into the marketplace and further down the social ladder, Susan E.Phillips offers a new account of premodern education, not through erudite tombs and schoolmaster sovereigns, but through these practical books that e