Escolapios contra jesuitas a propósito de la pedagogía del latín en la Italia del Settecento. Los discursos Pro arte poetica y De poeseos et poetarum estudio del escolapio Ubaldo Mignonio

Abstract

During the first half of the 18th century in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, there were frequent diatribes between Piarists and Jesuits clerics, trying the first ones to gain control of the mid-level education. One of the most common battlefields between the two orders was the latin pedagogy, and specifically the latin grammar. The members of the Pious Schools didn’t evade open criticism of the Society of Jesus’ methods, and a good example of this is the Piarist Ubaldo Mignonio, who in 1757, in Warsaw, published the discourse De poeseos et poetarum studio, in a collection called Noctium Sarmaticarum vigiliae, where he viciously attacked the grammar theories of the Jesuit Manuel Álvares, used primarily in the jesuit schools. This discourse was a rewriting of one of his older discourses, titled Pro arte poetica and published in Florence in 1723. The purpose of this paper is to analyse these discourses by Mignonio, insufficiently studied in our opinion, in order to contribute to the understanding of the methodological controversies around the teaching of latin during the 18th century.