Ramism - in Literature

In Literature

Brian Vickers argues that the Ramist influence did add something to rhetoric: it concentrated more on the remaining aspect of elocutio or effective use of language, and emphasised the role of vernacular European languages (rather than Latin). The outcome was that rhetoric was applied in literature.

In 1588 Abraham Fraunce, a protégé of Philip Sidney, published Arcadian Rhetorike, a Ramist-style rhetoric book cut down largely to a discussion of figures of speech (in prose and verse), and referring by its title to Sidney's Arcadia. It was based on a translation of Talon's Rhetoricae, and was a companion to The Lawiers Logike of 1585, an adapted translation of the Dialecticae of Ramus. Through it, Sidney's usage of figures was disseminated as the Ramist "Arcadian rhetoric" of standard English literary components and ornaments, before the source Arcadia had been published. It quickly lent itself to floridity of style. William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks consider that the Ramist reform at least created a tension between the ornamented and the plain style (of preachers and scientific scholars), into the seventeenth century, and contributed to the emergence of the latter. With the previous work of Dudley Fenner (1584), and the later book of Charles Butler (1598), Ramist rhetoric in Elizabethan England accepts the reduction to elocutio and pronuntiatio, puts all the emphasis on the former, and reduces its scope to the trope.

Geoffrey Hill classified Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) as a "post-Ramist anatomy". It is a work (he says against Ong) of a rooted scholar with a "method" but turning Ramism back on itself.