"Wherein hath Ramus been so offensious?": Poetic examples in the English Ramist logic manuals (1574-1672)

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 14, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 73-101

  Goeglein, Tamara A ^a  

^a FRANKLIN AND MARSHALL COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 53149137930     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.1996.14.1.73     Document Type: Review

References (61)

1. I wish to thank The Folger Shakespeare Library for the generous fellowship that supported my research for this essay.
2. For the most comprehensive bibliography of Ramist manuals, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).
3. Joseph S. Freedman has recently documented the popularity of Ramist textbooks in central Europe ("The Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus in Central Europe, c. 1570-1630," Renaissance Quarterly 46 [1993]: 98-152).
4. All references to Marlowe's Massacre at Paris are to The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Irving Ribner (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, 1963): 8:23. Since The Massacre at Paris was never entered in the Stationers' Register, its publication date is difficult to establish, although Ribner suggests that it could not have been written earlier than the death of King Henry III of France in 1589 (p. xxiii).
5. For a discussion of its publication history, see The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 1:355-60.
6. E. S. Leedham-Green catalogues a number of the Latin Ramist dialectic manuals in Books in Cambridge Inventories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2:652.
7. MacIlmaine's Logicke may be found in The Logicke of the Most Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus Martyr, ed. Catherine M. Dunn (Northridge, CA: San Fernando State College Press, 1969). The reference here is to pp. 6-7; future references will be placed in the text.
8. The poetic examples found in MacIlmaine come primarily from P. Rami Dialectica, Avdomari Talaei Praelectionibus illustrata (Basil, 1572), which was the final edition of Ramus' dialectic and includes selections from, among others, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Propertius, and Catullus.
9. In his vernacular Dialectique (Paris, 1555), Ramus incorporates passages from his contemporaries Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Marot.
10. e siècle en France. Du Bellay, Ramus et les autres (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986);
11. and Peter Sharratt, "Peter Ramus and the Reform of the University: The Divorce of Philosophy and Eloquence?" in French Renaissance Studies, 1540-70, ed. Peter Sharratt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976), pp. 4-20.
12. Ramist dialectic treatises were not, however, the first to include poetry. Lorenzo Valla and Rodolphus Agricola cite belletristic examples in their dialectical writings, although not as systematically and insistently as Ramus. The reader may wish to consult these classic studies of the development of humanist logic: Carl Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande, vols. 3-4 (1855-70; rpt. Graz: Akademische Druck-U. Verlagsanstalt, 1955);
13. Wilhelm Risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: F. Frommann, 1964);
14. Cesare Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell'Umanesimo: "invenzione" e "metodo" nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968).
15. Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 33. Elsky traces a movement from the scholastic model of language to the humanist model, which, for Elsky, locates the authority of words in cultural conventions.
16. For an informative overview of the "terminist" tendency in scholasticism, see L. M. De Rijk, "The Origins of the Theory of the Properties of Terms," in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, eds. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 161-73.
17. For an overview of the English Ramists, see Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 173-246.
18. Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger, eds. and trans., The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 8:139-407.
19. (For the dating of Milton's logic, which was probably written in 1645-47, see The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8:144-47.)
20. The reader may consult the Latin text of Milton's treatise in The Works of John Milton, vol. 11, ed. and trans. Allan H. Gilbert (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935).
21. Fraunce even adds illustrations from legal literature to those from the poets. Ralph S. Pomeroy offers a succinct bibliographical overview of Fraunce's dialectical writings and argues that Fraunce's attention to logical fallacies surpassed Ramus' own ("The Ramist as Fallacy-Hunter: Abraham Fraunce and The Lawiers Logike," Renaissance Quarterly 40 [1987]: 224-46).
22. "Ramus, Illustrations, and the Puritan Movement," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 17 (1987): 197, 196.
23. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have asked why most historians of humanism simultaneously acknowledge the "succes fou of Ramism within arts institutions across Europe" and "insist on the banality and triteness of Ramus' intellectual contribution to the liberal arts" (From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986], p. 162). They conclude that we have been unwilling to acknowledge a shift in the theory and practice of "humanism," a shift from a moral idealism to a practical pedagogy embodied in the "humanities" curriculum to which Ramist pedagogy was particularly well suited.
24. John C. Adams takes issue with Grafton and Jardine by arguing that Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus, a Ramist work, does voice the ethical ideals of humanist education ("Gabriel Harvey's Ciceronianus and the Place of Peter Ramus' Dialecticae libri duo in the Curriculum," Renaissance Quarterly 43 [1990]: 551-69).
25. Authorizing Words, p. 41.
26. I would add that nearly five decades ago Rosemond Tuve urged the provocative, if not troublesome, thesis that the "dialectical toughness" of Ramist habits of mind shaped the intellectual contours of English metaphysical poetry from Philip Sidney to Andrew Marvell (Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947], p. 343).
27. e siècle en France), I am less interested here in questions of practical influence than in the nature of the resemblance between poetic and logical discourses within Ramist dialectic manuals and theory.
28. Excerpts from Philip Sidney's and Edmund Spenser's poetry were included in some English Ramist manuals, and I have elsewhere examined the influence of Ramist habits of mind on Spenser's Faerie Queene ("Utterances of the Protestant Soul in The Faerie Queene: The Allegory of Holiness and the Humanist Discourse of Reason," Criticism 36 [1994]: 1-19).
29. Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 282.
30. Introduction to Scholae in liberales artes by Petrus Ramus (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), p. viii.
31. Ramus, p. 49.
32. This bipartite division of Ramist dialectic is modeled after Rodolphus Agricola's innovations. For more on this redistribution, see Ong, Ramus, pp. 112-16;
33. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, pp. 148ff.;
34. and Lisa Jardine, "Distinctive Discipline: Rudolph Agricola's Influence on Methodical Thinking in the Humanities," in Rodolphus Agricola Phrisius, ed. F. Akkerman and A. J. Vanderjagt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), pp. 38-57.
35. Peter Ramus and the Confusion of Logic, Rhetoric, and Poetry, University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology, 2 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1947), p. 19 (my emphasis).
36. Marthe and William Kneale find Ramist dialectic rhetoricized (The Development of Logic [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962], pp. 300-1);
37. E. J. Ashworth virtually ignores Ramus in her encyclopedic entry "Traditional Logic," in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 143-72;
38. and Mishtooni Bose argues that the poetry in Ramist manuals was "of no inherent importance to the logical analyst" ("On Kai Me On: A Tension in the Ramist Manuals?" Notes and Queries 236 [March 1991]: 31).
39. Temple wrote a Ramist logic (P. Rami Dialecticae libri duo, 1584)
40. and was an ardent Ramist apologist (see Ong, Ramus, p. 91
41. and idem, Ramus and Talon Inventory, pp. 506-10).
42. William Temple's Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry, ed. and trans. John Webster (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984), p. 80. References to this work will be incorporated into the text.
43. Temple, William Temple's Analysis, p. 30.
44. Temple asserts his agreement with Sidney (i.e., that the poet does not affirm) in the negative, "[s]i non de affirmatione, quae ex argumenti cum argumento velut amica compositione nascitur intelligatur: sed de illa, quae testimonii vim habet ad alterius enuntiati explicationem. Sin vero speciem affirmationis priorem notas, poesis est in affirmatione axiomatum frequens." ("[i]f we are thinking not of an affirmation that arises from the amicable assembling, as it were, of one argument with another, but rather of that affirmation that has the force of testimony to making that further truth-claim. But if you consider that first kind of affirmation, poetry is rich in the affirmation of axioms"; pp. 136-37; my emphasis.)
45. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 7. (I emphasize "significantly substituting.") I am indebted to Eco's theory of a global semiotics.
46. The Lawyer's Logic, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston, England: Scolar Press Limited, 1969), f. B.ijr. All references are to this edition.
47. A well-worn Ramist analogy avowedly recognizes this: "[Ramist] methode is like to Homers golden chayne, whereby thinges are sweetly united and knit so together, that if one Lynk fall of, the whole chayne is broken and dissolued" (Abraham Fraunce, The Lawyer's Logic, f. H.h.iiyv).
48. "Rodolphus Agricola and the Semantic Revolutions of the History of Invention," Rhetorica 2 [1984]: 187. Cogan traces models of invention from Cicero through Boethius to Agricola in order to point up the semantics of Agricola's revisionary invention.
49. Qtd. by Cogan, "Rodolphus Agricola," p. 187 (my emphasis).
50. A Theory of Semiotics, p. 49.
51. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 22.
52. This is the one crucial truth-check imposed on the logician that Temple is careful to note in his commentary: "e rerum natura & dispositione oritur" (pp. 136-37; my emphasis). For him, the itinerary of nature is discovered through categories of invention (the first part of Ramist method) and then verbally disposed through dialectical discourse (the second part).
53. Logic and Rhetoric in England, pp. 158-59. Howell succinctly glosses these laws on pp. 41-43.
54. The Logician's School-master: Or, a Comment Vpon Ramvs Logicke (1629), f. C3r.
55. The Artes of Logike and Rethorike (1584), f. Cr.
56. "Milton's Logic," The Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 37.
57. Milton, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8:213.
58. "Corresponds to" rather than "corresponds with" means "to be similar or analogous to" (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v., "correspond"). This meaning of "correspond," whose first occurrence is listed as 1645, nicely matches the date of the composition of Milton's logic (see ebove, note 10).
59. "The Semantics of Metaphor," in Semiotics, ed. Robert E. Innis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 255.
60. "Peter Ramus and Imitation: Image, Sign, and Sacrament," Yale French Studies 47 (1972): 30. Sharratt is quoting from Ramus' commentary on the Christian religion (Commentariorum de religione Christiana).
61. For more on the dichotomy between art and nature in Renaissance culture, see Derek Attridge's "Puttenham's Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 257-79.