Reconfiguration

Alsted and Bisterfeld, Hartlib and Comenius, Welsch and Leibniz all proposed to emend the Encyclopaedia of 1630, and all failed. Contemplating the failure of these attempts opens up the broadest vista attained by this study. The idea of an ‘enkyklios paideia’, a cycle or circle of instruction or education, is an ancient one which gradually took literary shape during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Three successive generations of reform—led by Agricola, Ramus, and Keckermann—and a fourth generation of collective effort by a whole community generated the most perfect literary manifestation of this idea in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia (section 11.i). For at least two generations after its appearance in 1630, scholars across Europe acknowledged the Encyclopaedia as the leading work of its kind and sought to revise or replace it. During this lengthy period, the connotations of the term ‘encyclopaedia’ shifted from designating a ‘cycle of studies’ to a genre of books which sought to summarize the circle of learning in print (section 11.ii). But with the failure to replace Alsted’s work, the systematically organized, pedagogically orientated, Latin encyclopaedias worthy of the name exploded into innumerable discrete topics which were reorganized in alphabetical order in the various European vernaculars to create a new genre of academic reference works inappropriately labelled ‘(en)cyclopaedias’ first by Chambers in 1728 and then by D’Alembert and Diderot in 1751. The implications of this transformation for the shape of European knowledge were profound. The demise of the age-old tradition culminating in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia can therefore be regarded as a major watershed in European intellectual history created by the simultaneous political, military, confessional, and intellectual crises of the mid-seventeenth century (section 11.iii).

Divergence

Since the function and form of Comenian pansophia derived from the previous post-Ramist tradition, its sources and basic working methods naturally betrayed the same family resemblance. Far from proceeding on strictly empirical principles, Comenius adopted from Alsted the idea that pansophia must derive from the ‘three books of God’: sense, reason, and revelation (section 8.i). Like Alsted, Comenius also collected and processed this huge variety of material within a system of commonplaces; while Hartlib and Dury, for their part, proposed using Alsted’s Encyclopaedia as the structure of a collaborative information processing centre known as the Office of Address for Communications. However bookish these methods may seem, they were not as far removed from Bacon’s actual practice as is commonly supposed (section 8.ii). The fatal disjuncture underlying the universal reform programme was not between empiricism and commonplacing but between philosophical and pedagogical goals. The fundamental objective was to expound a reformed system of universal knowledge in the systematic manner in which it could be propagated universally. But the reformation of knowledge in the patient, incremental manner advocated by Bacon required resistance to premature systematization. The Baconian pansophists were therefore forced to choose between pursuing the best means of transmitting received knowledge and the best means of transforming it. Since there was no point in communicating knowledge which remained fundamentally flawed, the universal reform agenda collapsed amongst Hartlib’s successors into the more coherent and manageable task of reforming natural philosophy alone (section 8.iii).

Germination

Decades ago, Walter Ong intuited a powerful link between the advent of printing with moveable type, the subsequent spatialization of discourse most strikingly evident in Ramism, and the corpuscular, mechanistic physics of Descartes (section 3.i). More recently, Klaas van Berkel has identified the precise location of this link in Snellius’ student, Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), who, working at the interface of artisanal knowledge and Ramist pedagogy, developed the basic principles of a physico-mathematical philosophy of nature which he passed on to Descartes in 1618–19 and to Gassendi and Mersenne a decade later (section 3.ii). Another figure of the same generation, Henricus Reneri (1593–1639), was inspired by a very similar set of interests and aspirations to become Descartes’ first devoted follower and perhaps closest friend (section 3.iii).

Reception

A comprehensive study of the reception of the post-Ramist tradition within central, east-central and northern Europe is a topic too large and amorphous for treatment in the space available here. Instead, the third section of this book deals with the more limited topic. Between the relatively modest and successful project of developing textbooks for teaching a revised philosophia novantiqua (Part I) and the hugely ambitious pursuit of universal reformation via pansophia and pampaedia (Part II) lay the intermediate aim of overhauling Alsted’s Encyclopaedia on the basis of the intellectual developments of mid-century. This chapter introduces that topic in three stages. The first provides a brief reminder of the scope and structure of Alsted’s culminating work (section 9.i). The second surveys its avid reception at every Latinate level of society throughout the Reformed world and beyond it (section 9.ii). The third discusses some of the objections to the work which helped provoke efforts to revise it (section 9.iii).

Dissemination

Although typically identified with English Puritanism, the nucleus of the correspondence network which Samuel Hartlib envisaged in 1634 was originally composed primarily by intellectuals displaced, as he was, from central Europe by the Thirty Years War (section 6.i). A brief survey of contacts which Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius maintained with the easternmost figures at the top of his list—Alsted and Bisterfeld in Transylvania—exemplifies the extent of his network, its tempo of communication, and some of the common interests which bound it together (section 6.ii). A more general census reveals a large number of Hartlibian correspondents educated in Herborn, Heidelberg, Bremen, Zerbst, Brieg, and Danzig. Responses to Hartlib’s circulation of Comenius’ first pansophic tract suggests the extraordinary similarity of pedagogical interests and aspirations which helped bind this far-flung network together (section 6.iii).

Expansion and Adaptation

The following two chapters show how crucial elements of the educational reforms developed above all by Comenius and propagated by Hartlib and his associates emerged out of common roots in the post-Ramist pedagogical traditions of central Europe. The goal of pansophia—expressed by Comenius as ‘Omnes, Omnia, Omnino’, that is, to teach all things to all human beings thoroughly and completely, by all available means—is the ultimate logical extension of the basic aim of Ramus and the tradition deriving from him: to provide a broader education to a wider segment of the population as quickly, easily, and inexpensively as possible (section 7.i). The means proposed to achieve these goals were also very similar: namely, to produce readily digestible compendia governed by Ramus’ three laws of method (section 7.ii). No less important for Comenius’ pedagogical programme were the praecognita, systemata, and gymnasia which structured Keckermann’s textbooks, together with the lexica added by Alsted. Even the most ‘Baconian’ of Comenius’ textbooks, the famous Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), emerged from a lengthy discussion amongst Hartlib’s friends undertaken in terms far more reminiscent of Keckermann and Alsted than of Bacon himself (section 7.iii).

Emendation

After Alsted and Bisterfeld fled Herborn for Transylvania in 1629, their work on perfecting the Encyclopaedia published in Herborn the following year continued uninterrupted for a quarter century. Alsted overhauled his topical encyclopaedia in a manuscript which was returned to Herborn in 1648 and destined for printing around 1650 but which has subsequently disappeared. He devoted additional work to recasting the post-Ramist Encyclopaedia in quasi-Lullist combinatorial form, leaving a set of extremely compact and provocative works in manuscript which were further developed by Bisterfeld and published by Heereboord and others after his death in 1655 (section 10.i). In 1674 a more modest proposal to overhaul the Encyclopaedia was published by Georg Hieronymus Welsch, a leading member of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum. The process in which this project was overwhelmed by a huge range of polyhistorical interests illustrates some of the ways in which encyclopaedism had been side-lined by other intellectual priorities in the course of the seventeenth century (section 10.ii). For Leibniz, the project of replacing Alsted’s Encyclopaedia with a more intellectually coherent and philosophically up-to-date work of the same kind became a lifelong aspiration; but with the end of the great educational boom of the long sixteenth century, the conditions which had nurtured Alsted’s life-long project had disappeared (section 10.iii).

Summary, Conclusions, and Prospects

The first part of this conclusion (section 12.i) surveys the development of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition in Reformed central Europe before 1630 (narrated in Commonplace Learning), the scattering of that tradition during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and its further development in relation to figures such as Descartes, Bacon, Comenius, and Leibniz (recounted in The Reformation of Common Learning). The second part (section 12.ii) reviews the argument of this pair of studies from a thematic perspective. Ramism is approached, not as a philosophical school, but as a pedagogical tradition, the most dynamic, innovative, disruptive, and influential to arise in the Protestant world between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Its trajectory, in both the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, parallels the graphs of new educational foundations and the growth of their student bodies and catchment areas. Its motive power is student demand, fuelled by the social, political, and confessional circumstances of the era and channelled most effectively through relatively modest institutions responsive to student needs. This explains why this tradition of pedagogical innovation emerged in such fragmented landscapes, why Ramist methods and institutions served as channels thorough which mercantile and artisanal impulses percolated into the academic world, and how they could generate the power to overthrow seemingly superior cultural forces, such as the prestigious humanist educational ideals of the era and entrenched confessional commitments. The book closes with the prospect of complementing traditional top-down intellectual history with a bottom-up approach which can contextualize leading works and thinkers within whole landscapes of digitally analysable data.

Renovation

The rapid assimilation of Cartesianism into the young Dutch universities is often regarded as evidence of the unique open-mindedness of Dutch society and culture during the Golden Age. Absent from such accounts is the fact that a disproportionate share of the earliest and most avid ‘Dutch Cartestians’ were in fact first- or second-generation refugees, displaced from the heartland of the Ramist and post-Ramist tradition in Reformed Germany during the course of the Thirty Years War (section 5.i). Particularly instructive is a group of early defenders of Cartesianism—Tobias Andreae, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich—educated in the Reformed academy in Bremen under the little-known figure of Gerhard de Neufville (section 5.ii). To this group can be added the Bremen-born Johannes Coccejus, whose variety of covenant theology was combined with Cartesianism to generate a tradition characteristic of the early Dutch moderate Enlightenment (section 5.iii). Placing the advent of academic Cartesianism within the intellectual diaspora of the Thirty Years War therefore opens fresh perspective on the Dutch Golden Age of the mid-seventeenth century and the intellectual fertility of Holy Roman Empire during the previous period (section 5.iv).

Status Quo Ante Bellum

Since this book is a sequel to Commonplace Learning, it begins with a synopsis of the previous volume. Ramism before 1620 was most deeply rooted in the fragmented political and confessional geography of the northwestern corner of the Holy Roman Empire. Its function was to provide small polities with the means to transmit the maximum amount of useful learning with a minimum of time, effort, and expense. The appeal of this pedagogy to magistrates, rulers, parents, and students generated a motive force capable of spreading Ramism horizontally from one gymnasium to another and then vertically through gymnasia illustria to full universities, even in the face of opposition by humanists and theologians. Student demand then forced the universities to adapt begin expounding traditional Aristotelian philosophical substance in quasi-Ramist pedagogical form. Once Bartholomäus Keckermann (c. 1572–1608) had emancipated philosophical instruction from the text of Aristotle in this way, bolder men like the young Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) began using Keckermann’s systematic method to assemble increasingly eclectic doctrinal mixtures. The stage was set to deploy similar pedagogical methods to ease the assimilation of the bold new philosophies of the era of Descartes into university instruction as well. But before that happened, however, the outbreak of the Thirty Years War destroyed the network of German Reformed educational institutions which had sustained this tradition and scattered its students and teachers in all directions. The Reformation of Common Learning narrates some of the consequences of that diaspora for the intellectual history of the mid-seventeenth century.