Bél Mátyás nézetei a latin nyelv iskolai oktatásáról = Mátyás Bél’s Views on the Teaching of Latin in Schools

Tóth, Gergely (2023) Bél Mátyás nézetei a latin nyelv iskolai oktatásáról = Mátyás Bél’s Views on the Teaching of Latin in Schools. In: A latin nyelv a kora újkori Magyarország és Erdély kultúrájában és művelődésében. Convivia Neolatina Hungarica (5). Lazi Könyvkiadó, Szeged, pp. 47-62. ISBN 978-963-267-573-2

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Abstract

In my study, I examined the views of Mátyás Bél (Matthias Bel, 1684–1749), a prominent Hungarian pedagogue, geographer and historian, on the teaching of Latin. In the schools he led (Banská Bystrica, Bratislava), Bél wanted to implement the pedagogical guidelines of August Hermann Francke, the great Pietist school organizer and church reformer, and his beloved professor, in the teaching of Latin, for example, teaching in the mother tongue, and simplifying the material of grammar and rhetoric. He also wanted to introduce the textbooks of Christoph Cellarius, another of his professors, namely the Latin-German dictionary Liber memorialis and the Latin grammar in German, which served Francke’s objectives but also represented a particular direction with their purist viewpoint. Consequently, Bél firmly rejected the old-fashioned and pretentious Donatus grammars and the textbooks of Comenius, which he considered to have been filled with “barbaric” neologisms. Bél also intended Castellio’s Dialogi sacri to be a practice reading for the lower classes, in which he also followed Francke. Bél’s ideas on mother tongue education were challenged by the multi-ethnic (German-Slovak-Hungarian, sometimes „Vend” or Hungarian Slovene) student population in his schools. He therefore expanded Cellarius’s dictionary into a quadrilingual one (Latin-German-Hungarian-”Czech”, the latter for Slovaks), which proved to be a successful initiative. However, his German professor’s Latin grammar in German was published only with a Latin translation by him, and this failed because of the disapproval of Hungarian school inspectors and administrators, who preferred to stick to the familiar old textbooks. Bél started translating the Cellarius grammar into Slovak and Hungarian, but did not finish them. Bél was already well aware of the obsolescence of the humanist school programme, which focused on Latin language and placed great emphasis on rhetorical and poetic studies, and he experienced the dissatisfaction of the students with it. That is why he has already tried to emphasise the usefulness of learning Latin and to point out the areas where pure Latinism is important. He could not, however, change the fundamental nature of schooling, namely the dominance of Greek and Latin studies, but he was already striving to teach the realia (especially geography and history).

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