Abstract
This chapter concentrates on the English reception of Ramism. The leading Ramists came from Cambridge University. Foremost among these radicals was Thomas Smith. He assembled a band of scholars that included Nicholas Bacon, John Cheke, Roger Ascham, and William Cecil. Ramus’s hopes for France as a nation of free Protestants resonated with Smith’s hopes for England. From farming stock, with practical experience of the land, Smith empathized with English civil grievances of 1549 that culminated in widespread rural protests. Smith’s intellectual response to these events culminated in De republica Anglorum (1581). The young Edward de Vere, whose education Smith supervised until 1562, learned of Ramus and studied Ramism under this mentor.
He was admitted in Queen’s college in the aforesaid University; a college then reckoned in the rank of those houses that favoured Erasmus and Luther, and harboured such as consorted privately together to confer about religion, purged from the abuses of the schools and the superstitions of Popery.
—John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (8)
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Notes
- 1.
Milton, as the author of Artis logicae plenior institutio, ad Petri Rami methodum concinnata, adjecta est praxis annalytica et Petri Rami vita (1672), would credit Ramus as “the best writer on the art” (11:3).
- 2.
Adams writes of the Dialectic when referencing Ramus’s Dialecticae libri duo.
- 3.
A French version of Liber de moribus veterum Gallorum was published in the same year as the Latin original.
- 4.
Cecil would hold this position until his death in 1598.
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Wainwright, M. (2018). Thomas Smith, Edward de Vere, and William Cecil. In: The Rational Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95258-1_2
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