Status Quo Ante Bellum

Since this book is a sequel to Commonplace Learning, it begins with a synopsis of the previous volume. Ramism before 1620 was most deeply rooted in the fragmented political and confessional geography of the northwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Its function was to provide small polities with the means to transmit the maximum amount of useful learning with a minimum of time, effort, and expense. The appeal of this pedagogy to magistrates, rulers, parents, and students generated a motive force capable of spreading Ramism horizontally from one gymnasium to another and then vertically through gymnasia illustria to full universities, even in the face of opposition by humanists and theologians. Student demand then forced the universities to adapt begin expounding traditional Aristotelian philosophical substance in quasi-Ramist pedagogical form. Once Bartholomäus Keckermann (c. 1572–1608) had emancipated philosophical instruction from the text of Aristotle in this way, bolder men like the young Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) began using Keckermann’s systematic method to assemble increasingly eclectic doctrinal mixtures. The stage was set to deploy similar pedagogical methods to ease the assimilation of the bold new philosophies of the era of Descartes into university instruction as well. But before that happened, however, the outbreak of the Thirty Years War destroyed the network of German Reformed educational institutions which had sustained this tradition and scattered its students and teachers in all directions. The Reformation of Common Learning narrates some of the consequences of that diaspora for the intellectual history of the mid-seventeenth century.