Ediția bilingvă a lui Johann Ignaz von Felbiger „Ducere de mână către cinste și direptate, adecă la copii rumuneştii neuniții cei ce în şcole cele mici să învață spre cetanie rănduită carte”, Viena, 1777. (I)

Context cultural și observații morfologice

Abstract

The present study aims to introduce the book Ducere de mână către cinste și direptate, adecă la copii rumuneştii neuniții cei ce în şcole cele mici să învață spre cetanie rănduită carte [Leading by the Hand towards Honour and Righteousness, that is, a Book Appointed for the Teaching of Reading to Orthodox Romanian Children in the Primary Schools], located at the Matica Srpska Library in Novi Sad, Serbia, in the library's digitized collection, in the Foreign 8section, 18th-19th centuries. Its author is Johann Ignaz von Felbiger, the most important pedagogue and reformer of the education system during the time of Empress Maria Theresa. 

      The first part describes the cultural context in which the education reform took place in the Habsburg Empire and the personality of Felbiger, who managed, through his monastic and Augustinian formation, to create an era, that is, a true movement to improve education, from the establishment of schools, the issuance of laws, the employment of a rigorously selected staff, the writing of textbooks, methodology and pedagogy books, with the full support of Empress Maria Theresa.

      The second part of the study is a linguistic analysis of the language at morphological level, the book belonging to the period 1640-1780 and reflecting its linguistic particularities. The study contributes to the broadening of investigations on the Romanian language of the second half of the 18th century, offering numerous examples of grammatical categories still in the process of consolidation. The linguistic analysis retains the most important facts regarding the norms of the era and the changes that occurred from a morphological point of view during the researched period.

      In the last part, the study presents some new aspects of the book (principles of pedagogy, rhetoric), opens some new directions of research (the book contains a true code of good manners from the 18th century and footnotes), which could be interesting for the fields of pedagogy, anthropology or philology.

      The book Ducere de mână către cinste și direptate is a complex text, not a simple ‘reading book’, as its author describes it, and can be studied from different and interdisciplinary perspectives.