Los monumentos de Gomes de Moura: un insólito manual de la enseñanza del latín, en el Portugal de decimonónico

Abstract

Gomes de Moura’s work, Noticia sucinta dos Monumentos da Lingua Latina, is an interesting document on the state of Latin language teaching, as well as the humanities in general, at the beginning of the 19th century in Portugal. In this treatise, Gomes de Moura aims to bring together several methodological traditions in the study of classical languages: on the one hand, the educational format of the Historia Latinae Linguae, which connects with an 18th-century tradition of teaching Roman language and culture through a kaleidoscopic array of scholarly data based on the bibliography of Latin texts, numismatics, translations, and so on; on the
other hand, this approach is combined with the Portuguese-royalist and rationalist grammatical learning methods that were deeply rooted in Portugal; finally, he also addresses a kind of outline of the historiography of rationalism in Portugal from the
16th to the 19th centuries. The Monuments will be studied in this work within the historical context of the tumultuous Portugal of the first half of the 19th century, so that the relevant interaction between the historical and educational panorama, with the teaching of the Latin language of that same period, can be appreciated.