Search Results

This chapter provides a synthesis of the ‘Reformation of Common Learning’, which progressively developed from Peter Ramus’s pedagogy in the mid-sixteenth century to the work of the Moravian Comenius in the mid-seventeenth. The essay stretches the traditional periodisation and disciplinary boundaries often applied to reformation studies. By implication, it calls into question the understanding of a seventeenth-century ‘post-reformation’ era, a point underscored by mid-seventeenth-century writers such as Milton who spoke of reform as a continuous process. The wider intellectual currents that were contemporaneous to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theological developments become essential to understanding the reception of reformation.

This chapter discusses Peter Ramus and his colleague Omer Talon and their contributions to the development of renaissance rhetoric. Ramus and Talon revolutionized the study of logic and rhetoric by linking the two subjects together and reducing the core teaching of both to a very small number of doctrines. Ramist dialectic comprised a short version of the topics, the proposition, the syllogism, and method, while rhetoric was reduced to four tropes, prose rhythm and poetic metre, twenty figures, and delivery. Ramus and Talon illustrated every aspect of their teaching with practical examples from the great writers. By reducing the number of doctrines Ramus ensured that pupils would move rapidly on from studying the textbook to observing the way in which Cicero and Virgil used the principles. The chapter also considers authors who did not follow Ramus's innovations.

This chapter is a study of the significance of figures of speech to humanist pedagogy’s attempt to divorce style from the invention of an argument and the judgment of its validity. The significance of figures to this attempt turned on a set of questions that preoccupied humanist teachers: Is language instrumental to thinking and do figures of speech act as constitutive structures of the mind? Or, is language simply ornamental to thinking? Is its work therefore dictated by mental operations from which these figures are excluded? Focusing on a series of pedagogical reforms adhering to the principles of Peter Ramus, it argues that a wide range of early modern teachers proposed an answer to these questions by subordinating the figures of elocutio to the places of inventio and inscribing the relative value of the one to the other into a paradigmatic account of the compositional process. Attending to the figure of epanodos in Book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, this chapter describes a counterfeit art of indecorous thinking in which figures of speech act as structures of the mind and establish the parameters of possibility for the imaginary worlds of early modern literature.

Chandieu was able to recommend the rather novel idea of using hypothetical syllogisms for “demonstrative truth” in Reformed theology because he considered his antecedent in each syllogism to arise out of the express words of Scripture, which are an indubitable source of truth for the theologian. His use of hypothetical syllogisms as such is more Stoic than Aristotelian, but is also highly dependent on the medieval theologians and philosophers. The terminology he uses for the parts of the syllogism is accurate. The most likely recent precedent for the use of hypothetical syllogisms for demonstrative truth is not Claude Aubery, but Jacob Schegk. Ten important conclusions close this chapter.

Hooker and Stone imbibed a philosophy based on the writings of Peter Ramus. Their Ramism was filtered through the thought of Alexander Richardson, another widely influential thinker whose positions shaped the education of Harvard College students for almost a century. Richardsonian Ramism offered a method whereby students could not only dissect reality into its component parts but also recover God’s intentions in creating it. It encouraged ministers to fit biblical narrative into logical boxes which would then govern the interpretation of that narrative. As it dichotomized all reality, Richardsonian Ramism reinforced the black/white distinctions of extreme Augustinianism, most notably the belief that God had from all eternity divided the human race into elect and reprobate. Ramist presuppositions turned the Bible into a set of data about nature, moral precepts, and exemplars, fostering a theology based on proof texts.

The moment unfolded in this book unravelled in the following decades, partly because its students moved on, partly because Lefèvre took up a controversial role in the French Reformation. But his circle’s books continued to cultivate a particular approach to learning, and especially to the cultural place of mathematics, through the sixteenth century. This epilogue picks out a specialist strand of this influence in Lefèvre’s edition of Euclid, often reprinted and used in the republic of letters. A second strand is discernible in the pragmatic stance towards the utility of mathematics held by their heirs, Oronce Fine and Peter Ramus, which came to define European culture.