Scholae in Liberales by Petrus Ramus, and: Colectaneae Praefationes, Epistolae, Orationes by Petrus Ramus and Audomarus Talaeus (review)

Abstract

Peter Ramus, born Pierre de la Ramée in 1515, appointed Regius Professor of Eloquence and Philosophy at the University of Paris, murdered by his academic enemies during the St. Bartholomew's Massacre in 1572, was a Renaissance humanist, reformer, and encyclopedist. His biographer, Freigius, claims that for his Master's degree Ramus defended the proposition "Whatever Aristotle has said must be considered fabricated." The topic not only gives testimony to Ramus' intellectual versatility, but it also foreshadows his reputation as an academic enfant terrible. The 300 editions of Dialectic in Latin or French along with over 150 editions of this Rhetoric attest to his enormous influence and popularity (see Walter J. Ong, Ramus and Talon inventory, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1958). As a humanist reform movement, Ramism prompted a furious debate about curriculum and other educational matters that lasted well into the seventeenth century. Ramist logic was at the center of that debate: virtually every book about dialectic in this period is an attack or defense of Ramist logic. Ramist logic flourished at Cambridge and was the first system taught at Harvard. It is identified with Puritanism, principally through the work of commentators—William Temple, George Downame, Richard Hooker, and Everard Digby. Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Miller have elaborated Ramus influence on the intellectual life of colonia America, an influence captured in Increase Mather's reference to Ramus as "that Great Scholar and Blessed Martyr." More recently, as interest in Renaissance rhetoric has grown, so has interest in Ramism. Wilbur Samuel Howell's Logic andRhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956) is an invaluable study of the period. Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Harvard, 1958), is a particularly resourceful and influential treatment of Ramist ideas. The two volumes under review here are works for the specialist: theymake available majordocuments of the Ramist corpus. Scholae in Liberales Artes (Lectures on the Liberal Arts), the most readable of Ramist works, is a collection of supplements to the textbooks Ramus wrote on the various arts. This volume also contains a set of lectures on Ramus' ideas about teaching policies. The order of this 1596 edition follows that of the curriculum: