Drawing its title from the extended title of Hartlib's translation of Comenius's Pansophia prodromus (1639), Howard Hotson's book tells the story of the Ramist tradition outside Germany during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) and in its immediate aftermath. It follows organically from its predecessor in the same Oxford-Warburg series, Commonplace Learning (2007), where Hotson traces the rise of the movement inspired by Peter Ramus in Reformed Germany and across Protestant Europe until its peak in 1630 with the publication of Johann Heinrich Alsted's Encyclopaedia.
The three decades of war had brought devastation to the leading educational institutions where Ramism had first flourished, forcing teachers and students to migrate elsewhere. This book narrates a largely untold story of intellectual migration by tracing the movement's diaspora in a shift that was as geographical as it was generational. The painful rupture caused by forced displacement soon inaugurated a series of new opportunities for the transmission, reception, advancement, and adaptation of Ramist pedagogical principles and methods.
The volume's contents are organized in three parts, which make very effective use of a series of case studies involving key figures belonging to the post-Ramist diaspora. The first part takes us to Leiden, the Dutch Republic's nascent university, where Ramism was first transplanted. Hotson challenges the myth of Leiden's reputed instantaneous rise to university stardom, to then illustrate the Ramist influence on artisanal and technical learning through two Leiden-educated contemporaries, Isaac Beekman (1588–1637) and Henricus Reneri (1593–1639). These two friends of Descartes, who stimulated the development of his mechanical philosophy, share an important biographical similarity in that they both taught in Latin grammar schools (gymnasia), poorer and peripheral institutions when compared with elite universities. A very compelling case is made for appreciating the pivotal role of gymnasia in the advancement of learning during the seventeenth century. Unlike Beekman and Renerius, Franco Burgersdijk (1590–1635) and his successor Adriaan Heereboord (1613–61) held chairs at Leiden. Burgersdijk was especially effective in adopting Ramist methods in textbooks for several subjects, especially logic. Heereboord and his own students later built on Burgersdijk's eclectic initiative by bringing together Ramist, Baconian, and Cartesian sources. The novelty of Dutch Cartesianism, Hotson argues, is incredibly indebted to Leiden's second generation of post-Ramist intellectual émigrés.
Shifting northward and eastward, the second part revolves around the German-Polish England-based reformer Samuel Hartlib (ca. 1600–62), his Scottish Calvinist colleague John Drury (1596–1608), and the Moravian itinerant pedagogue Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), and their most vivid correspondence with Alsted (1588–1638) and his student Johannes Bisterfeld (1605–55). Alsted had studied at Herborn, the epicenter of Ramist encyclopedism, and taught there until being forced into exile in Transylvania, where, together with Bisterfeld, he founded the Calvinist Academy. The Hartlib Circle, that impressive epistolary network originally organized among intellectual refugees from Reformed Germany, became the foremost promoter of Comenius's reforms. The sources and methods of Comenius's pansophy, Hotson maintains, are closer to the post-Ramist circles than to any form of purely empirical Baconianism. Yet the “fatal disjuncture” (413) underlying the universal reform program, we learn in the subsequent chapter, was not between empiricism and commonplacing but rather between philosophical and pedagogical objectives. Baconian pansophists after Hartlib felt compelled to “diverge” from (265) and “part ways” with (286) the ambitious project of universal reform, devoting their efforts solely to a reformation of natural philosophy.
The third part focuses on encyclopedism as a far-reaching project of reform across disciplines and beyond them into the social, religious, and political realms. Hotson insists on the uniqueness of the pedagogical, eclectic, and syncretic aims and methods of Alsted's encyclopedism. He then examines its broad reception and diverse elaboration from Transylvania to the Augsburg physician Georg Hieronymus Welsch (1624–77) and, perhaps even more significantly, in Leibniz. The roots of Leibniz's overall intellectual enterprise, this book suggests, are to be found in the post-Ramist tradition. Leibniz's lifelong predilection for the encyclopedic tradition, the author observes, emerges in a series of notes written before the second edition of the Nova methodus discendae docendaeque jurisprudentia (374). This observation is not elaborated, but it may be worth recalling that even in the work's original edition (1667), published upon the completion of his legal studies, Leibniz's early encyclopedic inclination is coupled with the kind of concern with pedagogical efficiency typical of post-Ramism.
A very helpful summary of both this volume and its predecessor, the concluding chapter seals the argument that the Ramist and post-Ramist pedagogical tradition was “the most dynamic, innovative, disruptive, and influential to rise in the Protestant world between the Renaissance and the Englightenment” (416). This pedagogical laboratory was also the theater or gateway (to say it in Comenian terms) where knowledge and learning met humanist, confessional, artisanal, mercantile, and political urgencies. Itself encyclopedic and pedagogical, Hotson's book is at once a panoply of information and a lesson in writing intellectual history, now and in an increasingly digital future.
