Title of the resource
Title of the resource in english
Publisher
SEDES [Société d'édition d'enseignement supérieur]
Original language
Target and Age Group
Students, beginner-level adults
Author of the Entry:
Marta Pszczolińska, University of Warsaw, m.pszczolinska@al.uw.edu.pl
Peer-reviewer of the Entry:
Elżbieta Olechowska, University of Warsaw, elzbieta.olechowska@gmail.com
Second Peer-reviewer of the Entry:
Ayelet Peer, Bar- Ilan University, ayelet.peer@biu.ac.il
Simone Deléani
Simone Deléani (born in 1930) is a French Latinist and a specialist in late and patristic Latin. She is an honorary lecturer at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. She is a former member of the board of directors at the Institute of Augustinian Studies and author of several publications on Cyprian of Carthage.
Questionnaire
caritaspatrum.free.fr (accessed: October 26, 2019)
Jean Beaujeu
Jean Beaujeu (1916 - 1995) - professor at the University of Lille, Nanterre and eventually at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, who also lectured at the universities in Ottawa and Princeton. He founded the review L’information littéraire, of which he was the Secretary General for almost 40 years. His research inspired him to write multiple influential publications (list of publications). He was also an academic editor and translator (Pliny the Elder, Minucius Felix). He inspired the work on the Latin textbook Initiation à la langue latine et à son système, which is still in use today. He was also a champion of incorporating Latin and Greek in education. He was decorated with the Croix de Guerre 1939-45 and was a Knight of the Legion of Honour.
source: Michel Alain. Jean Beaujeu. In: Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé : Lettres d'humanité, n°54, décembre 1995. pp. 301-302.
In memoriam ;
Jean Beaujeu: un fauteil piégé (accessed: October 26, 2019)
Jean-Marie Vermander
Jean-Marie Vermander is a Latinist, and lecturer at the University of Paris X-Nanterre.
list of publications: here (accessed: October 26, 2019)
Contents & Purpose
The textbook includes 21 lessons, each containing a fragment of a Latin text (texte d’étude), which is the starting point for learning vocabulary, syntactic forms and their use. The text itself follows a short commentary on the historical or cultural context; the column on the right includes a verbatim French translation. Below the text each lesson provides the relevant vocabulary and derivations from Latin to French connected to the text. The lesson contains grammatical resources divided into morphological and syntactical parts and ends with a revision and exercises (exercices d’assouplissement), as well as with additional texts for translatory activities (traduire and lecture). At the end of the course, the authors included additional texts with questions to consolidate the acquired knowledge and a test to verify it (textes de contrôle), tables of conjugation, a grammatical index, and a glossary.
Among the textes d’étude of each lesson, one can find the mythical history of Rome, based mainly on Livy: the myth of founding Rome, the tale of the rape of the Sabine women, of Numa Pompilius, or paragraphs about the Punic Wars. Besides that, there are also descriptions of Sicily and its culture and of Verres’ abuses revealed by Cicero. The texts also feature fragments from Caesar, Pliny the Younger, Seneca, Suetonius, Cicero, and even fragments of Satiricon.
The mythology is introduced to the course exclusively through Latin texts referring mainly to the mythical roots of Rome. In lesson 10, the reading refers to the beliefs of Gaul being conquered by Caesar’s army, yet the Gallic beliefs are described from the Roman point of view. Such mythological representation is quite unusual as the Roman conceptual framework is deployed to describe a foreign culture using familiar terms. As a result, the student does not learn about the Gallic pantheon, but rather about how Romans saw it. Lesson 12 presents the tale of the kidnapping of Proserpina from De errore profanarum religionum (VII, 1-3) - a work about the fight with paganism, sent to emperors Constantius and Constance by Firmicus Maternus, a 4th-century author. This text also presents a modified, non-canonical version of the myth changed into a simple story bereft of supernatural elements. The reason for such treatment was the author’s conversion to Christianity.
The more recent editions of the textbook, which has remained on the market since 1967, incorporate new texts and updates, yet they still retain the spirit of the course.
