Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts

Ramism in Britain and the Wider World

Emma Annette Wilson, Steven J. Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754667940
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317071587
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Most early modern scholars know that Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) is important, but may be rather vague as to where his importance lies. This new collection of essays analyses the impact of the logician, rhetorician and pedagogical innovator across a variety of countries and intellectual disciplines, reappraising Ramus in the light of scholarly developments in the fifty years since the publication of Walter Ong's seminal work Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Chapters reflect the broad impact of Ramus and the Ramist 'method' of teaching across many subjects, including logic and rhetoric, pedagogy, mathematics, philosophy, and new scientific and taxonomic developments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is no current work that offers such a broad survey of Ramus and Ramism, or that looks at him in such an interdisciplinary fashion. Ramus' influence extended across many disciplines and this book skillfully weaves together studies in intellectual history, pedagogy, literature, philosophy and the history of science. It will prove a useful starting point for those interested in Ramus and his impact, as well as serving to redefine the field of Ramist studies for future scholars.

Chapter 1
Ramus and Ramism: Rhetoric and Dialectic¹

Peter Mack

Petrus Ramus was on the one hand a thinker, teacher and educational reformer, and on the other a phenomenon of publishing and educational history. Although he eventually wrote textbooks on a wide range of subjects, rhetoric and dialectic were the curriculum subjects in which his work had its greatest impact. It was his works on rhetoric and dialectic, and not those on other subjects in the curriculum, which he continually revised throughout his career.² To an even greater extent than with other rhetoricians, we always have to think of his works as conceived as part of an educational programme, but we also have to understand that once his works were out there in print they could be adapted and used in educational programmes that were different – sometimes dramatically different – from what he had originally planned.

Over the last twenty years there has been a deluge of criticism of Ramus. Some have attacked his scholarship while others have bemoaned his influence, which in the strongest form of this criticism is alleged to have dumbed down generations of university students.³ There are important elements of truth in both types of criticism: Jacques Charpentier and Adrien Turnèbe were better informed on the subjects they knew than Ramus was; and Ramist teaching could promote an unsympathetic, reductive and impoverished understanding of Aristotle. But against these criticisms we must set Ramus’ dedication to his pupils and his success in teaching them, the pressures on him as an outsider to establish and defend a position in Paris, and the unquestionable demand for his works both at the time of their first publication and for almost a century after his death. What Ramus wrote responded to a need in his audience, or to a feeling of dissatisfaction with established ways of teaching rhetoric and dialectic. As historians we cannot dismiss the success of his writings as a fraud or an aberration, preferring to give our attention to, for example, Juan Luis Vives’ interesting and provocative rewriting of rhetoric, which was printed only twice in the sixteenth century.⁴

Above all, we must not succumb to a critique of Ramus like the late Father Walter Ong’s, which lumps together Ramus’ own alleged failings with the excesses of his followers.⁵ First we must try to understand Ramus’ own positions; then we can start to ask how different receptions and adaptations used Ramus’ work to respond to late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century educational circumstances. For the second part of this task we now have Howard Hotson’s Commonplace Learning to show how a group of smaller German universities adopted and adapted Ramus’ textbooks to suit their needs for efficient and practically-oriented teaching of university subjects.⁶

Before I begin my argument proper, though, I need to address a misrepresentation of Ramus which is unfortunately still widely held. Following on from Ong and Wilbur S. Howell, some sketches of renaissance rhetoric, particularly from students of English literature, still claim that Ramus reduced rhetoric to style and delivery.⁷ The element of truth in this view is that Ramist rhetoric textbooks contain only sections on style and delivery; but nevertheless this view is false, because Ramus always insisted that rhetoric and dialectic had to be studied together. In a properly Ramist scheme of teaching, everyone who studies Ramus’ rhetoric will also learn about invention and organisation (dispositio) from the dialectic text which is studied alongside the rhetoric. So whereas a traditional rhetoric course teaches five skills – invention, disposition, style, delivery and memory – Ramus’ students learned invention and disposition in the dialectic manual, and style and delivery in the rhetoric manual. What about memory? Ramus regarded the study of memory as part of psychology rather than as a section of rhetoric and he believed that an effective logical organisation, such as that used in his textbooks, offered the best possible help to memory. One should also point out that many of the other rhetoric manuals which have come down to us, including Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Cicero’s De Inventione as well as Melanchthon’s rhetorics, say nothing about memory.

This is not to say that all the elements of a traditional textbook giving a full course in rhetoric, such as the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, are covered in Ramus’ textbooks. I shall later give some examples of elements of rhetoric which are omitted. But in Ramus’ own teaching (and in that of almost all his followers) the pupil did not study rhetoric without also finding out about invention and organisation.

For a pedagogically oriented reformer like Ramus, the textbooks have to be interpreted in the light of the audience and syllabus the writer had in mind. Thanks to the publications of Peter Sharratt we have some strong indications of how this system worked in practice, both from Nancel’s description of Ramus’ teaching in the Collège des Presles and from Ramus’ projects for the reform of the University of Paris.⁸ The scheme he had in mind was that the rhetoric and dialectic textbooks should be studied in the mornings, with the afternoons given over to discovering the impact of this teaching in practice by reading through speeches by Cicero and classical Latin poetry, especially the work of Virgil. The point of the textbooks was that they should be brief and clear in their organisation so that pupils would be sure to finish the syllabus and to know them thoroughly, leaving them plenty of time to understand how logic and rhetoric worked in practice through their study of literary texts. The quotations from Cicero and Latin poetry in Ramus’ textbooks are intended to prepare for and reinforce that afternoon reading. Reading through the textbooks the precepts would be illustrated from Latin literature, while reading Latin literature would enable the teacher to show the impact of the skills taught in the textbook. The commentaries which Ramus published on Cicero’s speeches, and on Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics, give us a taste of what that teaching was like. Kees Meerhoff has shown that other renaissance literature teachers copied the approach of Ramus’ commentaries.⁹

For a better understanding of how Ramus adapted the traditional syllabus it is necessary to compare the contents of both syllabuses in more detail. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 comprise an outline of Ramus’ syllabus in rhetoric and dialectic.

Figure 1.1 Scheme of Ramus’ Dialectic

Figure 1.2 Scheme of Ramus/Talon Rhetoric

Dialectic is divided into invention and judgement. Invention involves fourteen topics of invention, including all the most important ones: definition, which includes genus and species, cause, effect, subject, adjunct, difference, contrary, comparison, similarity, and testimony. Treating division as a topic is a little unusual but reflects the important place which division had gained in sixteenth-century dialectic texts. Judgement involves traditional logical teaching on the proposition, a simplified version of the syllogism and method, which can be either perfect (that is to say from the most general rule to the most particular instance) or indirect (which allows for the ordering of the work to be adapted to the expectations of the audience).

Rhetoric is divided into style and delivery. Style includes four tropes (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and irony), rules for poetic meter and rhythmical prose, nine figures of repetition and eleven figures corresponding to attitudes a speaker might take to an audience (for example, frankness of speech, correctio, apostrophe, prosopopeia, two types of rhetorical question and two types of response to an imagined objection). Delivery discusses use of the voice and gestures appropriate to hand, face and body.

If we compare these outlines with outlines for the traditional syllabus of both subjects below (see Figure 1.3), we find a number of differences.

Figure 1.3 Outline of the Traditional Course in Rhetoric and Dialectic

First and most obviously Ramus has been highly selective. From dialectic he has concentrated on the topics of invention, the proposition, the syllogism and the issue of overall organisation. In so doing he has omitted the predicables, the categories, some parts of the syllogism and most of the alternative forms of argumentation, such as induction, enthymeme and example, the topical maxims and the sophisms. From rhetoric he has included invention, some aspects of organisation, a very much reduced list of the tropes and figures and a shortened version of delivery. From rhetoric he has excluded detailed teaching about the four parts of the oration, the special topics, status theory, amplification, handling of emotions, the three types of oration, the qualities and levels of style, and memory.

Secondly, although Ramus keeps, albeit in simplified form, the most famous and distinctive elements of both subjects (that is to say the syllogism and the tropes and figures), still overall his selection of topics better represents the long-lasting preoccupations of rhetoric. His main focus is on how to argue effectively to an audience using the full resources of the Latin language. He is not interested in the almost atomised language described in Aristotelian and scholastic logic. To put it more simply and provocatively, Ramus is strongly committed to the broad syllabus of rhetoric: invention, organisation, style and delivery.

Of course this needs to be qualified a little. The method and approach of Ramus’ textbooks in rhetoric and dialectic is primarily dialectical. We have seen how both subjects are articulated through definition and division; how Ramus avoids repetition and redundancy; how consistently he omits elements of the traditional syllabus of both subjects on the grounds that, for example, the categories properly belong to metaphysics, and memory and emotion are properly considered as part of psychology. In other words he uses logical criteria to determine both the content and the organisation of both textbooks. So the third conclusion could be seen as a development of the second: Ramus’ rhetoric and dialectic textbooks take a strongly dialectical approach to a syllabus which is primarily rhetorical.

Allow me to imagine an objection here. How can I say that Ramus’ interests are primarily rhetorical when Ramus omits both the four-part oration and the doctrine of the three genres of rhetoric, in other words the building blocks around which the traditional syllabus of rhetoric is organised? I want to reply to this objection in three parts.

First, Ramus allows a small space for the four-part oration when he concedes that alongside the true method there is also the method of prudence, which involves adapting the logic of one’s argument to the requirements of one’s audience.¹⁰ In the course of his numerous re-writings of the dialectic manual, Ramus treats the method of prudence more briefly and more critically, but he never removes it. In his commentaries on Cicero’s speeches Ramus concentrates on explaining the argumentative force of each of Cicero’s moves, but beyond that he shows how different sections of the speech have different aims and he continues to use the traditional terms for the sections of the speech, labelling one section as an exordium, another as a digression and so on. When he sums up the organisation of Pro Rabirio he shows that it observes both the rules of art (in that it places the fundamental arguments first) and the rules of prudence in that it is adapted to its occasion and audience.¹¹ So Ramus’ strategy here is less to reject the four-part oration altogether than to insist first that it is not the fundamental form of organisation and second that it is one form among others – one genre among others, one might almost say. Where some other renaissance commentators struggled to find the form of the four-part oration in every text, Ramus’ practice shows that the four-part structure is a helpful guide to some texts but not to all. In this respect Ramus’ practice has a good deal in common with Agricola’s approach in De Inventione Dialectica, in which he showed that the four-part oration was one of a number of possible forms available to a writer, gave examples of many different forms and argued that a writer would need to determine the form most appropriate for a particular work by thinking about subject-matter, aim, audience and circumstances in each case.¹² Ramus’ approach is more directive than Agricola’s but it seems to respond to similar concerns and perceptions.

In the second place, there is no doubt that Ramus rejects the idea that there are only three kinds of speech (judicial, deliberative and epideictic) but he was certainly not alone in taking this view. When Aristotle divided rhetoric into these three classes he had in mind the three occasions on which ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Ramus and Ramism: Rhetoric and Dialectic
• 2 Andrew Melville and Scottish Ramism: A Re-interpretation
• 3 Flat Dichotomists and Learned Men: Ramism in Elizabethan Drama and Satire
• 4 Reading the ‘unseemly logomachy’: Ramist Method in Action in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
• 5 Ramus, Printed Loci, and the Re-invention of Knowledge
• 6 The Secret of Success: Ramism and Lullism as Contending Methods
• 7 Petrus Ramus and the Vernacular
• 8 Ramus, Rheticus, and the Copernican Connection
• 9 The Legacy of Petrus Ramus in U.S. Composition: Realism, Scottish Common Sense, and Peircean Pragmatic Method
• 10 The Method of Exposition in Brynjolf Sveinsson’s ‘Commentary’ (1640) on the Dialecticae of Petrus Ramus
• 11 The Reception of Ramist Rhetoric in Hungary and Transylvania: Possibilities and Achievements
• 12 The Ramist Roots of Comenian Pansophia
• Index