Marginalii la o cuvântare funebră din anul 1824
Marginalia on a 1824 Funeral Speech

Summary/Abstract: During the research carried out for the monographical study dedicated to the important, but little known today lawyer and poet Vasile Aaron, we discovered a flyer containing a versified text written in Cyrillic, dated Lugoj, October 1801, and signed N.P. Those initials and the presence on reverse of an order issued by somebody named Pavel Petrovici regarding books from Johann Barth’s printing house, as well as the didacticist con¬tents of the writing, made us believe that it might belong to the Banat-born Naum Petrovici, occasional versifier and school officer in Pest in the first decades of the 19th century. Information concerning the life and work of the humble Naum Petrovici are vague and extremely scarce. Literary-cultural reference works omit him. Our attempt to unearth further information found a powerful support in a printed matter containing the funeral oration delivered by a student named Toma Popovici at the scholar’s grave. This pamphlet enabled us to establish the date of Naum Petrovici’s death, most probably August 1, 1824, as well as his approximate age, which must have been around 45 years.Naum Petrovici is among those who contributed to the establishment of pedagogy in the Romanian cultural area as a distinct field. He laboured to introduce new methods to teachers, by translating and adapting European pedagogical works. The working guide Pedagoghia şi Methodica pentru învăţătorii şcoalelor orăşeneşti şi săteşti [Pedagogy and Methodics for teachers in country and city schools], offered by him in 1818 to teachers in Banat, is a real plea for a more modern approach of education in schools and in the family, a call for giving up old, petrified methods of the past.

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