MOUNT VERNON — Mount Vernon High School Latin teacher Mary Jo Behrensmeyer spent a month last summer studying medieval Latin in Avignon, France, through a National Endowment for the Humanities foreign fellowship.
She said she applied for the competitive appointment because “Latin was a communicative tool that extended well into the Middle Ages.”
“In most high schools, the Latin curriculum is confined to the traditional classical authors of the Imperial age, such as Cicero, Julius Caesar and Virgil, but Latin literature extended far into the Medieval era,” she said. “I chose to study medieval Latin so I could incorporate it into my Latin curriculum.”
Behrensmeyer’s specific subject was the writings of Petrarch, who loved Latin and was trying to bring back Latin at the time. Specifically, she said, Petrarch wrote letters. As a language study aid, letters are going to involve gossip, romance, political intrigue, peer pressure, sibling rivalry, politics — all of those things that are of interest to high school students — and give them a better understanding of everyday life.
Behrensmeyer said the Avignon stay was an intellectual, very intense academic experience. Of the 15 high school teachers from all over the United States who participated in the seminar, she was the only one from Ohio, and one of only two who has a Latin background. The group met four times a week, from 7:30 a.m. until noon, for classes and discussions, then worked on assignments.
“We had four papers to write,” Behrensmeyer said. “We also had a one-hour-long presentation to give. You have classes. You have assignments, you have directed activities to study. You would get a passage of 30 or 40 lines, and you would have to take it line by and line and write about what the author is saying, how he is saying it, what it means and how it applies to the context of the culture, of the time, the political context in which it was written. ... You’re dealing constantly with language.”
Behrensmeyer focused on the letters Petrarch wrote to his brother Gherardo, a monk in a monastery in southern France.
“This was at the time of the plague,” she said. “All 34 of the monks in the monastery died except Gherardo. He was ordered by his abbot to leave, but Gherardo refused to leave. He stayed at the monastery and took care of those monks, buried all of them and went on to found another monastery in that area. I looked at the letters Petrarch and Gherardo exchanged. Some of the content dealt with guilt, because Petrarch did not go into the monastery and did not suffer like his brother did.”
Behrensmeyer said she also wanted to look at how Latin changed.
“With the introduction of Christianity in the fourth century, there would be new vocabulary words introduced, for example those associated with monasteries and liturgical rites. Not only did I want to look at the literature of Latin, I wanted to look at vocabulary that you’re not going to find in the classical dictionaries,” said Behrensmeyer.
As she compared classical Latin writings with Petrarch’s letters, Behrensmeyer sensed a transition to more modern sentence structures.
“I begin to see more transition to our word order,” she explained. “The normal Latin syntax is subject, direct object, verb. I begin to see a transition to our word order. I begin to see more words that look like the English.”
Avignon was a Roman walled city, and Behrensmeyer stayed in a 17th-century house within the ancient walls.
“Because you’re living there,” she said, “you’re surrounded by the history, the architecture and the culture, and you become more personally involved with the work you’re doing.”
In her free time, she also visited other Roman sites in the area, such as Arles, and got caught up in the excitement of the Tour de France when she was visiting Nimes.
