We should not learn Latin with grammarians: a study and translation of Jacopo Facciolati's inaugural speech ad Grammaticam (1713)

• Grant number: 14/26520-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: March 01, 2015
• End date: January 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Classical Languages
• Principal Investigator: Adriano Scatolin
• Grantee: Felipe Augusto Neves Silva
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

With this project, we aim to study, although shortly, the treatment of the Latin language and literature which they were receiving until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the same way that was reborn more than three hundred years before, in the sense of a real revaluation of classical studies, as they are called, and an important qualification of scholars and, consequently, methods and researches. From this point of view, we judged appropriate to make a more precise cut, to analyze one of the most important regions of Europe of that time and to pay special attention on the Italian scholar monk Jacopo Facciolati (1682-1769), who had completed his studies and encouraged a lot of other students among the teachers and the books of Padua's Seminary. Therefore we intend to examine, translate and comment the inaugural speech of that scholar, made in 1711 and published in 1713 in the presence of a lot of the most educated and influential people of northern Italy and the promising young talents who had gathered there for the start of a new academic year. That is the "Oratio ad Grammaticam", in which Facciolati was, on the one hand, trying to advocate the importance and relevance of learning Latin with perfection and, on the other hand, thinking about the simplest ways and the more efficient for this purpose.