2.1 - Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century with Rachel Bynoth

History of Education Society UK Podcast

For our first episode of the season, we talk with Rachel Bynoth about distance education in the late-eighteenth century and how using the dual lens of gender and emotions can help us better understand educational processes. We focus on Rachel's recent article in History, A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century, and discuss how a series of letters between two women - Hitty and Bess Canning - can help us understand how correspondence could serve as a means of informal education.
Rachel Bynoth is a postgraduate researcher and associate lecturer at Bath Spa University. She is a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, specializing in social, gender, and emotions history. Her PhD research focuses on the Canning family as a case study of the operation of remote familial relationships. She also serves as a committee member of the History Lab, the postgraduate wing of the Institute for Historical Research, and currently is the co-convenor of their seminar series. You can read more of her work at The Conversation.
A transcript of the episode is available at the History of Education Society website, along with more information about our events, publications and conferences. You can follow the History of Education Society UK on Twitter and keep up-to-date with the latest research in The History of Education journal.
Sources

A Mother Educating her Daughter Remotely through Familial Correspondence: The Letter as a Form of Female Distance Education in the Eighteenth Century by Rachel Bynoth

What one Georgian family can teach us about writing letters in the age of Zoom by Rachel Bynoth

Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century by Serena Dyer

‘”A celebrated correspondence between the charming Mrs C- formerly well-known in the fashionable World – & her Amiable Daughter”’: The Historical Importance of the letters of Hitty and Bess Canning by Rachel Bynoth