Event time:
Thursday, April 9, 2026 - 4:30pm
Location:
LC 319
Event description:
Susie Phillips is Professor of English at Northwestern University and winner of an Alumnae of
Northwestern Teaching Professorship, the University’s highest award for distinguished teaching.
Author of Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (2007), she
has published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance
dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy. Her new book, Learning to
Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England (published by
University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025) 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.
Northwestern Teaching Professorship, the University’s highest award for distinguished teaching.
Author of Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (2007), she
has published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance
dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy. Her new book, Learning to
Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England (published by
University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025) 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.