Ramismo
Ramismo en la Filosofía Renacentista
El objetivo principal del lógico y filósofo francés Petrus Ramus era proporcionar un método de enseñanza de las artes liberales que permitiera completar el programa de estudios de licenciatura en 7 años. Este método se basaba en una nueva lógica, en la que la compleja estructura del Organon de Aristóteles y de las Summulae logicales de Pedro de España se reduce a dos doctrinas principales: la invención de argumentos, mediante la cual es posible encontrar las nociones para razonar y disputar en cualquier disciplina, y la disposición de los argumentos en juicio, es decir, en proposiciones y silogismos. Dado que esta lógica se aplica tanto a los razonamientos demostrativos como a los probables, Ramus y Rudolph Agricola, quien la introdujo por primera vez, la denominaron dialéctica. Ramus completó esta doble dialéctica con un método, según el cual las disciplinas deben ser enseñadas proporcionando definiciones generales, para ser explicadas por divisiones dicotómicas posteriores. Según Ramus, este método asegura una jerarquía y una división bien ordenadas de las disciplinas, y un medio eficaz para enseñarlas en un tiempo más corto que en los programas pedagógicos de Juan Luis Vivès, Johann Sturm y Philipp Melanchthon. Este método tuvo su principal difusión en las instituciones preuniversitarias como las gymnasia alemanas y las gymnasia illustria (por ejemplo, de Herborn), mientras que en las universidades reformadas y católicas la aceptación del ramismo se vio obstaculizada por el predominio del plan de estudios aristotélico.
El método post-ramista en la Europa Protestante, 1543–1630
Keywords: Ramism, pedagogy, universities, Calvinism, Holy Roman Empire, Thirty Years War, Bartholomäus Keckermann, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Herborn, Heidelberg
Ramism derives, by common consent, from the approach to dialectic developed by the Frisian humanist, Rudolph Agricola of Groningen. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, Agricolan dialectic was most firmly institutionalized in the northwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire, a region straddling both the lower Rhine and what subsequently became the border between the eastern Netherlands and Germany: Deventer, Münster, Cologne, and also Marburg. It was from this region, as Ramus himself acknowledged, that three Rhinelanders first exported this tradition to Paris in the later 1520s; and it was from the most important of these, Johann Sturm, that Ramus himself learned it.1
Unsurprisingly, the Rhineland region which had first institutionalized Agricolan dialectic also most warmly welcomed back Ramus’ development of it in the immediately subsequent years. In 1543—the very year in which Ramus published the first version of his dialectic—one of his earliest students, Johann Lambach, was already introducing his approach into the important gymnasium in Dortmund. Eleven years later—from 1554 onwards—the first foreign independent editions of Ramus’ work appeared in Cologne (the chief centre of Agricolan publishing), Dortmund itself, nearby Lemgo, and also in Basle. In the (p.2) 1560s, the production of Ramus’ two main works was already gravitating back from France to Germany.2
It was therefore also natural that Ramus chose the Rhineland as the focus of his promotional tour in 1568 and 1570. But Walter Ong’s assertion that this tour was responsible for transplanting Ramism to Germany wilfully misconstrued the basic bibliographical facts recorded in his own Ramus and Talon Inventory. Despite Ramus’ visit, his methods failed to establish themselves in most of the prestigious universities and academies he visited: Strasbourg, Tübingen, Freiburg, Zürich, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Heidelberg, and initially also Basle. Meanwhile, Ramism had established itself spontaneously, without any salesmanship on Ramus’ part, in the lower Rhineland regions from which it had originated.3 The region’s dominance in posthumous reprintings was consolidated by the arrival in Frankfurt of Ramus’ favourite Parisian printer, André Wechel, who fled before the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre brutally ended his friend’s turbulent career in August 1572. But Wechel continued to share the market especially with printers associated with the gymnasia, academies, and universities in which Ramism was most firmly institutionalized: Christoph Corvinus in Herborn, Wilhelm Antonius and his son Peter in Hanau, and smaller enterprises in Bern, Bremen, Kassel, Lemgo, Neustadt, Nuremberg, Speyer, Steinfurt, and Zürich. Taken together, their contribution to the posthumous publishing history of Ramus’ works was enormous: of the 290 editions of his dialectic and rhetoric printed between Ramus’ death in 1572 and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, over 80 per cent were published in Germany and the (German-speaking) Swiss confederation.
An adequate explanation of the spread of Ramism based firmly in the empirical data must therefore be grounded in some feature of northwestern Germany which caused Ramism to proliferate there more vigorously than anywhere else in Europe. Walter Ong’s thesis, that Ramism is an epiphenomenon of the printing press cannot account for the concentration of posthumous Ramist imprints in such a small geographical area. The alternative explanation, that Ramism is an adjunct of Puritanism, cannot account for the fact that Ramism was decisively rejected from all the leading Reformed universities throughout the sixteenth century.
The following account provides such a grounding in three stages. The first relates Ramism to one of the key social developments of the period: the ‘educational revolution’. The second (p.3) roots this social development in underlying trends: demographic, political, and confessional. The third locates the specific roots of Ramism in the politically and confessionally fragmented landscape of the Rhineland.
The first step—relating Ramism to key social developments—is easy, since (as Ong was by no means the first to emphasize) Ramism was not fundamentally a philosophical movement so much as a pedagogical one.5 To explain the general trajectory of Ramism as a pedagogical movement, (p.4) it therefore makes sense to link it to the great educational development of the period: the doubling of the number of students in European universities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Lawrence Stone dubbed the English manifestation of this development ‘the educational revolution’. Even more impressive evidence of it in Germany was compiled half a century earlier by Franz Eulenberg.
This educational boom is obviously rooted, in turn, in more fundamental contemporary developments. The supply of students resulted from demographic expansion—that is, from the steady population growth which marked the sixteenth century. The demand for more educated people was stimulated by political and confessional developments also central to the period: the consolidation of governmental authority required a huge expansion in the corps of educated office-holders; and the process of religious reformation increased the demand for more educated clergy, which was further heightened in the latter third of the century by competition with a reinvigorated Catholicism.7
(p.5) These widespread phenomena—population growth, state formation, confessional conflict, and the huge surge in student numbers—obviously cannot explain the initially tightly circumscribed spread of Ramism. In addition, reference must also be made to the peculiar confessional and political geography of the corner of the Empire from which Ramism ultimately derived and in which it initially flourished, a geography strikingly evident in the different ways in which different areas of Europe responded to this educational boom. In England, the surge of students documented by Stone was accommodated within the two ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the Inns of Court. In Germany, by contrast, this educational boom provoked a proliferation of educational institutions without parallel elsewhere in Europe. Stuidng the geographical distribution of university and immediately sub-university foundations during the crucial period between 1550 and 1630 it is immediately apparent that these foundations were clustered much more tightly in western Germany than anywhere else, and especially in the northwesterly region in which Ramism also proliferated simultaneously.
The proliferation of educational institutions in these concrete conditions is not difficult to understand. This Rhineland region was not only the most fragmented region in early modern Europe politically; it was also, precisely in these decades, arguably the most complex confessionally. The corridor sandwiched between the Dutch Republic and the three main German Reformed states—the Lower Palatinate, Nassau, and Hesse—was also occupied by all three senior Catholic ecclesiastical princes of the Empire: the electoral prince-archbishoprics of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this was also one of the most confessionally contested regions in Europe. Some of its territories had remained Catholic (notably Mainz and Trier). Others converted permanently from Catholicism to Lutheranism (Braunschweig, Waldeck, Hesse-Darmstadt, and several of the Wetterau counties). A third group converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism and then to Calvinism (these include Nassau-Dillenburg, Bentheim-Steinfurt-Tecklenburg, and Hesse-Kassel). Still others (such as Cologne and Westphalia), after flirting with Protestantism, had been reconverted to Catholicism. In yet other territories (Mark, Cleves, and Berg), two or three of these confessions coexisted simultaneously. Finally, the Lower Palatinate was officially converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism to (p.6) Calvinism, then back to Lutheranism, then back to Calvinism again, all in the 37-year interval between 1546 and 1583.
Confessional competition within a politically fragmented landscape turned this region into the pedagogical laboratory of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. On the one hand this competition increased the need for educational programmes. Most of these small territories shared borders with politically and confessional antagonistic neighbours; and the resulting confessional competition greatly heightened the need for bureaucratic centralization and religious confessionalization, both of which ultimately depended on educational systems to supply the necessary trained manpower. On the other hand, this fragmentation also multiplied the number of pedagogical experiments which could be pursued simultaneously and expanded the ability of individual states to pursue pedagogical strategies tailored to their individual needs, semi-independent of the educational norms of larger neighbouring states. Thirdly—and for present purposes most importantly—this territorial fragmentation also compelled the smaller states to innovate pedagogically.
This is where Ramism finally comes into the picture. The élite universities in the most prosperous and prestigious states in other regions of Germany could afford to pursue these educational goals in the traditional manner, updated with reference to the humanist pedagogy which was reaching the acme of its prestige in the latter sixteenth century. In these leading universities, philosophical instruction in the 1580s and 90s was increasingly dominated by verbatim commentaries on the classics, especially on the Greek text of Aristotle; and Ramist shortcuts were anathema.8 This approach, although exceedingly prestigious culturally in this period, was extremely cumbersome pedagogically, designed to nurture a handful of great scholars rather than to meet the needs of the tidal wave of students pursuing higher education in this period.9 The tiny territories on the lower Rhine—imperial free cities, imperial counties, small and highly fragmented duchies—lacked both the imperial status to obtain university charters from the emperor and the economic resources to maintain full universities or to pursue the sophisticated but very costly humanist pedagogy institutionalized within them. Less interested in prestige than practical utility, the magistrates of these modest polities also needed institutions capable of maximizing the return on their precious educational investment. The smaller polities of this region were thereby forced, by dint of their small size, to innovate both institutionally and pedagogically. Institutionally, they developed means of providing quasi-university education on a civic or territorial basis by developing highly stratified gymnasia and gymnasia illustria, which not only taught grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic like the preparatory schools in larger states but also expanded in their upper levels to provide an encyclopaedic curriculum, including a wide range of philosophical and mathematical instruction in the gymnasia, and sometimes also the three higher faculties (law, medicine, and theology) in the gymnasia illustria.10 Pedagogically, they also needed a highly efficient, readily learned, and immediately applicable approach to teaching and learning, which could allow them to provide this quasi-university education on such slender means. No pedagogical approach available in the sixteenth century met these needs as well as Ramism.
Ramism’s suitability to their purposes was ultimately grounded in the experience of Petrus Ramus himself. Ramus was the grandson of a charcoal burner whose education in Paris was twice disrupted by lack of (p.9) financial means and who only managed to complete his university studies by working as a servant to a wealthy fellow student during the day and studying at night. The stripped down approach to education which he developed was designed to preserve an avenue of social mobility for disadvantaged students like himself too poor to afford a protracted education of the traditional kind.11 Rejected in the ancient university of the great French capital, Ramist pedagogy began gravitating back to the fragmentary landscape of northwestern Germany from which most of its constituent ideas it had come; and it is not difficult to see how the efficiency, utility, ready applicability, and cost-effectiveness designed to help cash-strapped students like himself also appealed strongly to hard-pressed city fathers and German princelings trying to provide quasi-university education on extremely limited means. Stripped down to the essentials and therefore hyper-efficient, Ramism promised these magistrates the maximum return on their meagre educational investment. Practically useful and readily applied, it also appealed to the pragmatism of mercantile city fathers and reforming rulers. Emphasizing mathematics, modern languages, and flexible tools of communication and organization rather than technical niceties of philology and logic, it offered precisely the kinds of knowledge which they most needed and valued. As a result, Ramism was initially institutionalized in Germany within the very distinctive educational institutions of a specific stratum of imperial states: the civic gymnasia of semi-autonomous Hanseatic cities and lesser imperial free cities, from which it spread to the gymnasia illustria of imperial counties and some of the empire’s smallest duchies.12
If Ramism had remained in these humble institutions, it would have remained historically insignificant. But this fragmented landscape had also produced a highly competitive higher education market, in which those institutions which met the needs of the growing numbers of relatively humble students flourished, while those which did not suffered; and in these circumstances Ramism proved highly mobile. First it spread horizontally, from one gymnasium to another, as its popularity with students, parents, and patrons became clear. Then, crucially, it spread vertically, as students educated in Ramist fashion rose from the gymnasia via the gymnasia illustria into the universities of Germany’s larger territorial states and demanded a similarly efficient and effective approach to their (p.10) philosophical education. Finally, once suitably modified, it spread horizontally once again: geographically from its original base throughout the international Reformed world, and confessionally from the Reformed world in modified forms throughout the international Lutheran world as well. Here again, the motive power was provided largely by international students who returned home steeped in Ramist and post-Ramist pedagogy and began promoting similar methods throughout the huge catchment area of the German universities, which extended from Scotland and the Dutch Republic via Scandinavia and east-central Europe to the Swiss confederation.13
This steady progress outward and upward raises a further urgent question: what force powered this ineluctable expansion, often in the face of entrenched opposition from prestigious humanists and senior theologians? The answer to this question is to be found in Ramism’s appeal, not merely to magistrates, but to students as well.14 Precisely the characteristics which recommended Ramism to the hard-pressed magistrates who founded and sustained these Ramist institutions—its efficiency, its utility, its ready applicability to a wide range of useful tasks—appealed no less strongly to the hard-pressed students from less privileged social backgrounds crowding into Europe’s universities in this period, and indeed to the parents and patrons paying their educational bills. The alignment of priorities is once again the product of the tiny scale of these fragmentary polities, which narrowed the social, economic, and cultural gulf between the magistrates who founded and maintained these institutions and the students who frequented them. Medieval universities in this region had typically been founded by great ecclesiastics to serve the needs of the church. Germany’s early modern universities were typically founded by princes to serve the needs of the state. The highly stratified gymnasia in which Ramism was originally institutionalized, however, were founded by mercantile city fathers and designed to serve the needs of urban élites themselves. It can therefore scarcely be coincidental that these unique institutions—devoted to providing quasi-university education in the interests of a fairly broad spectrum of local citizens—should have adopted and developed a pedagogical system which proved hugely attractive to a broadened spectrum of ordinary laymen.
It was Ramism’s appeal to the students educated in those gymnasia which ultimately explains its spread from these gymnasia upward through the educational hierarchy and outward geographically and (p.11) confessionally. Schooled in the highly efficient Ramist manner within these civic gymnasia, these students demanded equally efficient instruction when they moved on to higher studies in the more élite gymnasia illustria and then eventually in full universities. In the relatively open educational market of sixteenth-century Germany—where a large number of institutions competed with one another to attract these students, and where students often paid their lecturers directly for private as well as public tuition—those institutions and individuals which responded to student demand flourished while those which resisted it often floundered.
Moreover, if we look in turn to these other areas in which Ramism was institutionalized most firmly, developed most creatively, and preserved most tenaciously, we find that the basic conditions are remarkably similar. Many are independent or semi-autonomous city states, attempting to provide quasi-university instruction on their slender civic resources. Alongside Dortmund and Bremen, the Swiss cantons of Basle, Bern and Zürich fall into this category, as well as the semi-independent city-states of Polish Prussia: Danzig, Elbing, and Thorn. Others (like Nassau-Dillenburg and Anhalt) are small and semi-autonomous principalities within the Holy Roman Empire, notably the Silesian duchies of Beuthen and Brieg. Another category consists of small and financially hard-pressed institutions founded in larger kingdoms and colonies on the margins of European influence: the tiny university-colleges of Scotland and Ireland, the still more isolated colleges of colonial New England,15 the gymnasia illustria founded on the German model by Gustavus Adolphus in early seventeenth-century Sweden and subsequently throughout Sweden’s expanding Baltic empire,16 and, at the easternmost margin of the Reformed world, the Transylvanian schools and academies, most notably the gymnasium illustre founded on the model of Herborn in Gyulafehérvár (Alba Julia).17
(p.12) It would be easier to trace the ramifications of this tradition if the rudiments of Ramism remained unchanged by these travels. But Ramism had never been a stable or unitary phenomenon. From the outset, it was highly protean. It had been assembled largely from pre-existing components originating in this Rhineland region. Throughout his lifetime, Ramus himself constantly rethought his project and rewrote his works; and this process continued unabated after his death. Gravitating back to the Rhineland region from which most of its ingredients had come, the posthumous Ramist tradition continued to ramify into a large number of variant strands.
Three transformations are particularly noteworthy, all of them prompted by the percolation of Ramism upward from the Latin gymnasia (which concentrated on the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic) to the gymnasia illustria or academies (which capped a schola classica or paedagogium devoted to trivial teaching with a schola publica teaching some combination of mathematics, natural and moral philosophy, and one or more of the three higher disciplines of medicine, law, and theology). First, in order to prepare students for more advanced study of philosophy and the higher disciplines, most of these institutions attempted to fuse Ramist pedagogical clarity with elements of Aristotelian philosophical substance to create a hybrid approach variously know as ‘mixed’, ‘semi-Ramist’, or ‘Philippo-Ramist’, the latter so-called with reference to the extremely popular Aristotelian textbooks of the praeceptor Germaniae, Luther’s lieutenant, Philip Melanchthon.18 Second, Ramism was gradually confessionalized: as Reformed teachers used it to expound theology, inserted theological examples into logical and rhetorical textbooks, and incorporated Ramist pedagogical reforms into broader, Calvinizing waves of further reformation, Lutherans were alienated from the tradition.19 Third, the expansive curricula of the gymnasia illustria prompted the composition of textbooks organized on Ramist and semi-Ramist principles on the full range of academic disciplines and indeed beyond, including the mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) as well as cosmology, optics, and surveying, a broader canon of moral philosophy (including history, oeconomica, and politics), psychologia alongside physica, metaphysics (a subject rejected by Ramus himself), the three higher faculties (medicine, law, and theology) and also such diverse disciplines as Libavius’ Ramist exposition of alchemy, or Alsted’s of Lullism (p.13) and the art of memory. ‘In Germany,’ as Ong observed, ‘Ramist method moves into the uppermost branches of the curriculum with a drive which cannot be matched in any other country.’20
Even more dramatic transformations ensued as students moved upward through the educational hierarchy from these gymnasia and academies into the German Reformed tradition’s full universities. Products of these Ramist institutions naturally sought a university education as clear, readily learned, and easily applied as the Ramist and semi-Ramist pedagogy on which they had been schooled. These demands conflicted both with the humanists’ preference for teaching philosophy through verbatim commentaries on the ancient texts and with the theologians’ insistence that a proper grounding in Aristotelian logic was indispensable for the defence of orthodoxy at the height of the confessional age. The only possible solution to this conundrum was to refashion the substance of Aristotelian teaching in semi-Ramist form. Pioneering efforts in this direction were made by a new generation of post-Ramist pedagogues led by Otto Casmann (1562–1607) and Clemens Timpler (1563–1624), but the classic solution was achieved by Timpler’s student in Heidelberg, Bartholomäus Keckermann (c. 1572–1608).21
Although Keckermann was philosophically anti-Ramist, he was pedagogically post-Ramist for two compelling reasons: Ramism had provoked the pedagogical crisis to which he responded; and in order to respond to that crisis, Keckermann needed to develop a clear, methodical manner of exposition inspired by Ramism. For this purpose, he deployed the latest advances in Renaissance Aristotelianism formulated by Jacopo Zabarella (1533–89), recently imported to Heidelberg by two professors who have previously studied with him in Padua: Fortunatus Crellius (d. 1605?) and Giulio Pace (1550–1635). The result was a tripartite method of instruction in which praecognita introduced disciplines expounded in systemata and practised in gymnasia. Each chapter of the praecognita and systemata was then further divided into praecepta, which stated key points of Aristotelian doctrine as clearly and briefly as possible, and commentaria, which clarified, expounded, and defended them. The praecepta were then further subdivided into definitions, divisions, and rules, which treated the essence, parts, and essential properties of a discipline respectively. Beginning every subject by treating definitions and divisions was Keckermann’s clearest concession to Ramism, which allowed him to retain and further propagate the branching tables so characteristic of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition.22
Returning reluctantly from Heidelberg to the academic gymnasium in his native Danzig, Keckermann set about applying his new systematic method of exposition to the full range of philosophical disciplines. The success of this method not only allowed Keckermann’s post-Ramist pedagogy to break through into the fully fledged universities of the German Reformed tradition: it also spread geographically to become a standard method of exposition throughout the Reformed world and confessionally to the Lutheran world as well. It was due to the popularity of Keckermann’s logical textbook with Lutheran students—despite his tendency to illustrate logical points with innumerable anti-Lutheran theological examples—that professors in Germany’s Lutheran universities were forced to adopt Keckermann’s systematic, post-Ramist method of instruction in their own textbooks. The result was a huge surge of ‘systems’ of every discipline, which became the chief method of academic exposition in Germany for generations thereafter.23 Finally, it was students and teachers returning from years of study in these Reformed and Lutheran institutions in central Europe who institutionalized the successive waves of this post-Ramist traditions elsewhere.24 After overwork led to his premature death in 1608, the entire series of Keckermann’s textbooks was drawn together into one of the most impressive encyclopaedias created by this tradition in the Systema systematum edited by the young Herborn philosopher, Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), in 1613.
The purpose of Keckermann’s ‘methodical Peripateticism’ was to repackage the substance of Aristotle’s philosophy in quasi-Ramist form; but the intellectually adventurous Alsted immediately perceived another possibility. Alsted used the ‘systematic’ method of exposition devised by (p.15) Keckermann25 as a commonplace structure within which to assemble material26 from a far broader range of authorities, ancient and modern.27 He then sought to synthesize these authorities into what he called a systema harmonicum, as the basis for an eclectic mode of teaching which could potentially burst the bounds of Aristotelianism altogether: his treatment of physics, for instance, sought to synthesize Aristotelian doctrine with a Mosaic physics drawn from the Bible, a rabbinic physics derived from the Kabbala, and a chemical physics based on alchemy.28 Finally, he expanded the disciplinary scope of the post-Ramist tradition still further to include the full range of liberal and mechanical arts, philosophical and higher disciplines,29 and brought all of these disciplines together into the first printed work to be entitled simply ‘encyclopaedia’, which represented the culmination of the entire German Reformed post-Ramist tradition.30 But by the time Alsted’s Encyclopaedia appeared in 1630, virtually the entire network of German Reformed institutions which had created it had been devastated in the first decade of the Thirty Years War.31
The situation resulting from these developments is complicated but not incomprehensible. One level of complexity is a narrative which can conveniently be punctuated into six successive phases. The first phase sees the topical logic of Rudolph Agricola institutionalized first and most firmly in the Rhineland region. In the second, the works of Ramus himself, drawing inspiration from his Agricolan predecessors, are endlessly reworked by their author himself before 1572 and then by followers who adopted and domesticated them thereafter. In the third phase, further varieties of semi-Ramism are developed back in the Rhineland region, some of them introducing aspects of Aristotelian teaching into Ramist textbooks, others seeking to recast Peripatetic textbooks (many of them also deriving from Agricola) into Ramist or quasi-Ramist form. The fourth stage produces the ‘methodical Peripateticism’ of Keckermann, which used the methodological innovations of Zabarella to create a ‘systematic’ means of expounding Aristotelian content in semi-Ramist form. In a fifth phase, all of these rapidly proliferating textbook traditions (p.16) use Ramist, semi-Ramist, or ‘systematic’ methods to treat curricular and extra-curricular disciplines not part of Ramus’ original oeuvre. Finally, the sixth phase is the post-Ramist eclecticism most evident in the case of Alsted, who uses Keckermann’s systematic form of exposition to assemble and attempt to reconcile not only Ramist and Aristotelian content but other intellectual traditions as diverse as Lullism, the arts of memory, alchemy, and Mosaic physics. Each one of these phases draws upon the previous phases, but a second level of complexity is created by the fact that the earlier forms continue to coexist even as the later ones take shape.
What did all these variant approaches have in common? Two things above all: their aims and their origins. The common aim of all of these ramifying traditions was to escape the limitations of what Keckermann called ‘textual Peripateticism’, that is, the humanist practice of basing university instruction on the matter of Aristotle expounded in the order of Aristotle—whether in verbatim commentaries or in briefer synopses or compendia. In pursuing this common goal, they differed in both form and content. Formally, some used strictly Ramist method to structure their textbooks, while others applied the principles laid down by Zabarella. Substantially, some preferred to pour the old wine of Aristotle into new bottles of post-Ramist form, while others departed from the substance as well as the form of Aristotle, whether in preference for Ramism or some more eclectic mix. But crucially, each phase of innovation responded to the circumstances created by the previous one in two ways: by adopting and adapting the pedagogical principles previously articulated within this tradition or by responding to the pedagogical circumstances created by previous stages in the tradition. The most powerful of these pedagogical conditions was the growing number of students schooled in Ramist or post-Ramist methods, who demanded similar semi-Ramist clarity, facility, and utility in all the subjects they studied at university and who then employed similar methods when they themselves began to teach. It is for this reason above all that this long lineage must be regarded as a continuously unfolding tradition: this sequence of pedagogical reformers pursued a coherent set of aims with a continuously evolving set of tools in response to the educational conditions created by previous phases of the tradition. Each phase of the tradition can only be understood with reference to the previous phases; and since the most radical and disruptive of these phases was that associated with Petrus Ramus, the tradition as a whole can be legitimately described as Ramist and post-Ramist even after Keckermann has (p.17) responded to the crisis precipitated by Ramism by refashioning Aristotelian doctrine in semi-Ramist form.
Commonplace Learning traced the history of these developments until their culmination in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia of 1630. But by the time this work was published, the central European institutional matrix which had nurtured this tradition was almost completely destroyed and its main exponents scattered across the length and breadth of Reformed Europe by the first phases of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). The Reformation of Common Learning attempts to chart the next phase in that development: the destruction of the central European Reformed core of the posthumous Ramist and post-Ramist tradition; the diaspora of students, teachers, and educational principles in all directions; their role in helping to transplant aspects of this tradition into a variety of environments where they bore a variety of fruit; and the relevance of some of this fruit to understanding the most important intellectual development of the period: the reception and institutionalization of the new philosophies first articulated in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Such a survey confronts several difficulties. In the first place, tracing a diaspora of this kind requires mastering a huge body of dense prosopographical information. While such data is fundamental to the argument, it is difficult to summarize with the concision needed in this instance, where it merely provides the foundation for an argument about the intellectual traditions which it carried. Second, attempting to sketch out a movement which expands to embrace the whole of Protestant Europe—from Translyvania to New England and from Bern to Uppsala—poses the additional difficulty of accessing material in many different languages. A third, related problem is relative density of documentation: for some aspects of this story, the documentation is so abundant that only a bare summary can be provided here; for others, it is so patchy that no more than a sketch can be provided. A fourth challenge is the literary one of managing to narrate multiple, parallel lines of development taking place simultaneously both within individual regions and across Protestant Europe as a whole.
These challenges are worth confronting in order to reveal the full scope of this complex but coherent story, because one of the core theses of these pages is that the intellectual histories of Protestant Europe during the crucial middle years of the seventeenth century need to be written in a far more international manner than has typically been practised hitherto. It is impossible to understand the golden ages of the Dutch (p.18) universities without placing them in the context of earlier and broader developments. (The oldest curriculum drafted for Leiden university in 1575 closely followed that outlined by Ramus himself 20 years earlier. But from 1582 onward, after the arrival in Leiden of the great humanist scholar, Justus Lipsius, modern textbooks were swept aside in favour of unmediated study of classical authors. The extermination of Leiden’s Ramist tradition is personified in the figure of Rudolph Snellius. In Marburg before 1575, his teaching aroused such enthusiasm that his former students and colleagues spent years assembling his draft material into a nine-volume, 3,000-page encyclopaedia published in Frankfurt in 1596. In Leiden after 1582, however, his preferred teaching methods were proscribed and he languished for twenty years as an extraordinary professor of mathematics, belittled by his humanist colleagues, and publishing nothing under his own name. As a consequence, Leiden and the other Dutch universities became net importers of philosophy textbooks for five decades, producing very few of their own and relying instead on the key figure of the central European post-Ramist tradition: Bartholomaeus Keckermann. Throughout this entire period, Leiden—contrary to widely accepted myth—grew slowly, remained relatively small, and was marginal to international Reformed student travel, until the Twelve Years Truce in 1609 began a growth spurt accelerated by the Thirty Years War after 1618).
The same applies to some of the excitement which punctuated English intellectual history at intervals throughout the 1630s, 40s, and 50s. Although typically identified with English Puritanism, the nucleus of the correspondence network which Samuel Hartlib envisaged in 1634 was originally composed primarily by intellectuals displaced, as he was, from central Europe by the Thirty Years War (section 6.i). A brief survey of contacts which Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius maintained with the easternmost figures at the top of his list—Alsted and Bisterfeld in Transylvania—exemplifies the extent of his network, its tempo of communication, and some of the common interests which bound it together (section 6.ii). A more general census reveals a large number of Hartlibian correspondents educated in Herborn, Heidelberg, Bremen, Zerbst, Brieg, and Danzig. Responses to Hartlib’s circulation of Comenius’ first pansophic tract suggests the extraordinary similarity of pedagogical interests and aspirations which helped bind this far-flung network together.
Likewise, this approach can lend coherence to the more diffuse intellectual histories of the vast areas of northern and east-central Europe from which Protestant communities sent their sons to Germany and later the Dutch Republic for education abroad throughout this period. Nor can the reception of canonical thinkers like Bacon and Descartes and the genesis of later figures like Leibniz be decoupled from these far broader and humbler intellectual developments. A comprehensive study of the reception of the post-Ramist tradition within central, east-central and northern Europe is a topic too large and amorphous for treatment in the space available here. Instead, the third section of this book deals with the more limited topic. Between the relatively modest and successful project of developing textbooks for teaching a revised philosophia novantiqua (Part I) and the hugely ambitious pursuit of universal reformation via pansophia and pampaedia (Part II) lay the intermediate aim of overhauling Alsted’s Encyclopaedia on the basis of the intellectual developments of mid-century.
For the first of these stories, however, we cannot begin in 1630 or even in 1618. In order to understand wartime developments in the Dutch Republic, a retrospective account must be provided of pedagogical developments between the founding of the university of Leiden in 1575 and the two watershed events of 1618–20: the Bohemian Revolt and the Synod of Dordt.
Análisis Argumentos Dialéctica Educación Ramus Lógica Método Retórica