Ramism in Cambridge
A Ramist tradition took root in Christ's College, Cambridge in the 1570s, when Laurence Chaderton became the leading Ramist, and Gabriel Harvey lectured on the rhetoric of Ramus. Marshall McLuhan's dissertation on Thomas Nashe (via the classical trivium), who was involved in a high-profile literary quarrel with Harvey, was shaped by his interest in aligning Harvey with dialectic and the plain style (logic in the sense of Ramus), and Nashe with the full resources of Elizabethan rhetoric. After Chaderton, there was a succession of important theologians using Ramist logic, including William Perkins, and William Ames (Amesius), who made Ramist dialectic integral to his approach.
William Temple annotated a 1584 reprint of the Dialectics in Cambridge. Known as an advocate of Ramism, and involved in controversy with Everard Digby of Oxford, he became secretary to Sir Philip Sidney about a year later, in 1585. Temple was with Sidney when he died in 1586, and wrote a Latin Ramist commentary on An Apology for Poetry. Sidney himself is supposed to have learned Ramist theory from John Dee, and was the dedicatee of the biography by Banosius, but was not in any strict sense a Ramist.
This Ramist school was influential:
| “ | The Ramist system was introduced into Cambridge University by Sir William Temple, in 1580, and contributed to the growth of Cambridge Platonism. It became the basis of Congregational apologetics. The Cambridge Puritans were represented by Alexander Richardson, George Downame, Anthony Wotton, and especially by William Ames, whose writings became the favorite philosophy texts of early New England. In 1672, the same year in which Ames's edition of Ramus's Dialectics with Commentary appeared, Milton published his Institutions of the Art of Logic Based on the Method of Peter Ramus. Other Puritan divines who popularized the Ramist philosophy and Covenant Theology were William Perkins, John Preston, and Thomas Hooker. | ” |
Christopher Marlowe encountered Ramist thought as a student at Cambridge (B.A. in 1584), and made Peter Ramus a character in The Massacre at Paris. He also cited Ramus in Dr. Faustus: Bene disserere est finis logices is a line given to Faustus, who states it is from Aristotle, when it is from the Dialecticae of Ramus.
There is a short treatise by John Milton, who was a student at Christ's from 1625, published two years before his death, called Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio ad Petri Rami Methodum concinnata. It was one of the last commentaries on Ramist logic. Although composed in the 1640s, it was not published until 1672. Milton, whose first tutor at Christ's William Chappell used Ramist method, can take little enough credit for the content. Most of the text proper is adapted from the 1572 edition of Ramus's logic; most of the commentary is adapted from George Downham's Commentarii in P. Rami Dialecticam (1601)—Downham, also affiliated with Christ's, was a professor of logic at Cambridge. The biography of Ramus is a cut-down version of that of Johann Thomas Freigius (1543–1583).
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