RAMUS, PETER

(b. Cuts, Vermandois, France, 1515; d. Paris, France, 26 August 1572),

logic and method, pedagogy, mathematics, astronomy, optics, mechanics.

For the original article on Ramus see DSB, vol. 11.

Ramus studies up to 1960 were dominated by two works by Father Walter Ong: his Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) and his exhaustive bibliographical study of the publication of Ramus’s texts after his death (the Ramus and Talon Inventory of the same year). There were a number of presuppositions in his approach that have since been questioned. Ong’s underlying thesis was that the relationship between print culture and oral culture changed over the period of Ramus’s life, and that Ramus reflected, rather than instigated, this change. This change meant a shift away from the transmission of learning through oral and broadly discursive means to a visual representation of thought in diagrams and dichotomous tables. Ong argued that the spatialization and quantification of thought in dialectic and logic from the late Middle Ages onward enabled a new state of mind to emerge in print culture representing a real mathematical transformation of thinking associated with the emergence of modern science. According to this thesis, Ramus was characterized not as an original thinker but as a pedagogue responding to this subconscious movement in intellectual life. Ramism was said to be “not a respectable theory but a set of mental habits.” Ramus was portrayed as a not very erudite and philistine schoolteacher with an unimpressive grasp of ancient languages, who sacrificed accuracy, subtlety, and depth to ease of exposition. The great popularity of Ramus’s writings after his death, and of the method which they exemplify, was said to be due to their simplicity and their applicability to many forms of pedagogy rather than any intrinsic merit.

Ong himself did not devote much space in his work to the biography of Ramus. More work has since been done by Guido Oldrini, Kees Meerhoff, Marc van der Poel, Judith Rice Henderson, and Jean-Eudes Giret to shed light on the Parisian context of his activities, his role in the university, the polemics in which he engaged, and the consistency of the positions adopted by him. From this it emerged that he was a quite exceptionally combative figure both in his attacks on ancient and contemporary thinkers, and his proposal of his own very radical ideas. His plans for syllabus reform, and his attacks on some of the mainstays of the curriculum—Aristotle (or rather, Aristotelianism), Cicero, Euclid, and Quintilian— provoked the wrath of established figures in the university such as Antoine de Gouveia and Joachim Périon, who were as violent in their responses as Ramus had been in his attacks. His positive proposals for syllabus reform, expressed in the Advertissements sur la reformation de l’université de Paris, au Roy (also issued in Latin) of 1562, were reflected also in his radical redrawing of the relationship of dialectic to rhetoric, and his promotion of the quadrivium, especially mathematics. He remained remarkably consistent in his views on these issues, even though some were not fully spelled out until the late 1560s.

His own method of teaching was practical and direct in style, involving both teacher and pupil: for the study of humanist texts, for instance, an initial brief methodical exposition of texts was followed by direct exposure to them. Ramus expressed the belief that all men possessed a natural capacity for reasoning, which Aristotelian logic disguised rather than helped deploy. This natural faculty should be developed in the briefest and clearest way, and together with a simplified version of rhetoric, it should be applied to human life and actions for the practical benefit of individual and society. His democratic commitment to the natural light of reason led him to extend his teaching to those who had no Latin; although a French translation of his Dialectica and a vernacular Ramist version of rhetoric did appear in the 1550s, this part of his educational program was never fully worked out or implemented.

Ramus’s radical critique of education did not stop at the arts faculty; his suggestions for reforms in the higher faculties of law, medicine, and theology were as fundamental, and created a different set of enemies for him. In an enterprising biography, James Veazie Skalnik convincingly argues that his proposed reforms were prompted by a vision of university education as a site of social mobility. Ramus, the low-born provincial who suffered the social

disdain of his academic colleagues, was a meritocrat whose reason for shortening the arts course was to make it affordable to poorer students, and who openly declared himself the enemy of the self-perpetuating university oligarchies he saw around him. He was also convinced of the sound intellectual basis of his contributions to a new version of the arts course. Studies on the Dialectica (his most published work, whether in Latin or in vernacular languages) and his concept of method and logic, notably by Nelly Bruyère, have shown in detail how simplified schema for logic gradually took shape; and Kees Meerhoff revealed the importance of Philipp Melanchthon as one of his major sources, together with Roelof Agricola and Johannes Sturm. The Rhetorica of 1548, once ascribed to Omer Talon, has been attributed by James J. Murphy to Ramus himself, and reveals another facet of his general reshaping of the field of logic and rhetoric. His contributions to mathematics, science, grammar, and orthography are also now seen as more important than hitherto, thanks to the work of Reijer Hooykaas, J. J. Verdonk, and Geneviève Clerico.

Religious Aspects More attention has been paid to Ramus’s religious beliefs and thinking, including the difficult question of when he was converted to a Reformed practice of religion. Although his first participation in a Protestant Eucharist did not occur until 1569, in Heidelberg, there is some evidence that he was a sympathizer by the 1550s. The characterization of Ramus as a Protestant martyr, which began with Théophile de Banos’s biography of 1576, was adopted by Charles Waddington in his nineteenth-century biography: to it, he added a vision of Ramus as the herald of a new age that would cast off the shackles of superstition and the tyranny of ancient authorities. Against this, Ong’s work portrayed Ramus as a lukewarm Christian humanist, whose work was taken up by international Calvinism in the years after his death. Ong’s view has been shown to be as misleading as Waddington’s whiggish hagiographical account. Ramus left one, late, work on religion, the Commentaria de religione Christiana, which was published posthumously in 1576. This has been shown to be anything but Calvinist, as it does not espouse the sacramental theology of the Genevan church of Ramus’s day, but rather is consistent with the Zwinglian doctrine of the Eucharist as no more than an act of commemoration. In his relations with French Reformed churches, Ramus also made clear his Congregationalist rather than Presbyterian leanings. His dealings with Théodore de Bèze and Geneva were stormy: After his death, both the French Calvinist academies and the Dutch universities with similar sympathies evinced strong resistance to his theological and anti-Aristotelian ideas. What emerged from this is Ramus’s independent-mindedness, his uneasy relationship with authority, and his unwillingness to compromise; but these characteristics do not make of him the lukewarm Christian and the slavish passive mirror of underlying forces in intellectual life that Ong portrayed: they rather reveal his energy, courage, determination, clear objectives, and fixed principles, as well as his fiery nature.

Ramus’s Legacy The earlier accounts of the fortunes of Ramism after his death have also attracted criticism for their concentration on his influence in England, Scotland, and seventeenth-century America, and their relative neglect of its European dimension, especially in Germany and farther east. This occurred in spite of the fact that Ong’s Ramus and Talon Inventory showed the extraordinary extent to which Ramus’s works were used as textbooks in precisely those areas. Howard Hotson rejects both technological change and religious ideology as the fundamental explanation of the unique flourishing of Ramist pedagogy in northwestern Germany and focuses instead on the basic geopolitical feature of the region in a major new study. Ramism, Hotson argues, was embraced by rulers and magistrates in many of central Europe’s smaller Protestant territories as a means to deliver quasi-university education within states too small to maintain full universities. The streamlined pedagogy developed in these sub-university institutions also appealed strongly to students seeking an efficient, affordable, and readily applicable education.

There is a strong prosopographical patterning to this uptake, which is also not purely Reformed (Calvinist) but also Philippist in nature, confirming the Melanchthonian element in Ramus’s thought that his later adherents would have found attractive. A somewhat different reason for the popularity of his method and thinking has been offered by Christian Strom, who argues that an important factor in the appeal of Ramism was its relevance to the anxieties caused by the breakdown of the coherent social, religious, and political world of the later Middle Ages and the desire to reestablish a sense of order. These two views are not inconsistent with each other and are united in seeing the contribution of Ramus to the emerging need for a new overarching intellectual order, which culminates in the encyclopedism of Johann Heinrich Alsted. From all these studies, a more positive representation of Ramus the man and Ramism the philosophy emerged than that which characterized Ramist scholarship up to the 1960s.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY RAMUS

Collectaneae praefationes, epistolae, orations. Introduction by Walter J. Ong. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms, 1969.

The logike of the moste excellent philosopher P. Ramus, martyr. Translated by Roland MacIlmaine. Edited by Catherine M. Dunn. Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College, 1969.

Scholae in liberales artes. Edited and with an introduction by Walter J. Ong. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms, 1970.

Rudiments of Latin Grammar. Menston, U.K.: Scolar Press, 1971.

Grammaire. Paris: France Expansion, 1973.

Rami Scholarum metaphysicarum libri quatuordecim, in totidem Metaphysicos libros Aristotelis; recens emendati. Edited by Joan. Piscatorem Argentinensem. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Minerva, 1974.

Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian: Rhetoricae distinctiones in Quintilianum. Translated by Carole Newlands with an introduction by James J. Murphy. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986.

Peter Ramus’s Attack on Cicero: Brutinae quaestiones. Translated by Carole Newlands, with an introduction by James J. Murphy. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1992.

Dialectique. Edited by Michel Dassonville. Geneva, 1964. 2nd ed. Edited by Nelly Bruyère. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1996.

OTHER SOURCES

Bruyère, Nelly. Méthode et dialectique dans l’oeuvre de la Ramée. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1984.

Feingold, Mordechai, Joseph S. Freedman, and Wolfgang Rother, eds. The Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences. Basel, Switzerland: Schwabe, 2001.

Hooykaas, Reijer. Humanisme, science et réforme: Pierre de la Ramée. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1958.

Hotson, Howard. Commonplace Learning: Ramism and Its German Ramifications, 1543–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Meerhoff, Kees, ed. Ramus et l’université. Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2004.

Meerhoff, Kees, and Jean-Claude Moisan, eds. Autour de Ramus: texte, théorie, commentaire. Quebec, Canada: Nuit Blanche, 1997.

Meerhoff, Kees, Jean-Claude Moisan, and Michel Magnien, eds. Autour de Ramus: le combat. Paris: Champion, 2005.

Oldrini, Guido. La disputa del metodo nel Rinascimento: indagini su Ramo e sul ramismo. Florence, Italy: Le Lettere, 1997.

Robinet, André. Aux sources de l’esprit cartésien: l’axe La Ramée-Descartes: de la Dialectique des 1555 aux Regulae. Paris: J. Vrin, 1996.

Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm. Topica universalis. Eine Modelgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft. Hamburg, Germany: Meiner, 1983.

Sharratt, Peter. “The Present State of Studies on Ramus.” Studi francese 47–48 (1972): 201–203.

———. “Recent Work on Peter Ramus (1970–86).” Rhetorica 5(1987): 7–58.

———. “Ramus 2000.” Rhetorica 18 (2000): 399–455.

Skalnik, James Veazie. Ramus and Reform: University and Church at the End of the Renaissance. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002.

Verdonk, J. J. Petrus Ramus en de Wiskunde. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1966.

Ian Maclean