ABSTRACT
“Romanticism Domesticated: Maria Montessori and the Casa dei Bambini” was written the year I was a Visiting Scholar at Radcliffe College and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. The immediate occasion was an invitation to contribute an essay to a book celebrating the Educational Legacy of Romanticism. That volume and the seminar in October 1988 that brought together the contributors to it was sponsored by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. I am grateful to those participants in that quite unusual meeting who gave me constructive criticism and especially to John Willinsky, the book’s editor and the conference convenor, for allowing me first to refuse the topic that he assigned me and then to reject the one that I myself named. In so doing he gave me my first chance to present publicly one of the several strands of research that came together a few years later in The Schoolhome.
