Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Cracow 2009
Educational Reform, Philosophy, and Irenicism

Gábor KECSKEMÉTI
Ramism in Hungary and Transylvania in the Early Modern Period

The subject of the paper is an overview of the influence of Petrus Ramus in Hungary and Transylvania, with some constraints: we do not discuss those Hungarians and Transylvanians who met Ramus in Paris. Giving an outline of these early connections would not be difficult, because there were only a handful, but the subject of the paper is Ramus’s influence in Hungary and Transylvania transmitted by the academic and university life in Germany. This is much more numerous than the direct personal connections with Ramus, because it grows out of the history of connections embedded organically in the studies of Hungarian youngsters at foreign universities. The young people whom Ramus’s influence reached through German channels were mostly Protestant students of theology. Their attention was drawn mostly to dogmatic views of their denomination, to the ethical consequences of these views, and to the special homiletic knowledge needed to express these. Nevertheless, higher students obviously attended ceremonial events at the university, including philosophical disputations and rhetorical declamations of younger fellow-students, and other local political occasions. So they had the chance to acquire general knowledge of the subjects taught at Faculties of Arts, to be informed about arguments of propaganda regarding new or controversial trends, and to draw their conclusions. Obviously, the impact of Ramism can appear in this circle only after its reception in Germany becomes apparent and becomes a topic of discussion. Thus, the presentation of these processes can start with the 1570s. However, these early traces are sporadic, and we can talk about Ramism that had a deeper influence on the trends of intellectual history in Hungarian and Transylvanian thought only from the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Educational objectives and philosophical outlooks of the different Protestant trends all left some room for Ramean views. It is best expressed by the often-cited numbers of editions of Ramean works in German territory. However, the basis of classification will not be these editions but the schools that used them. The schools, however, often used local textbooks based on Ramus’s works instead of the originals themselves. These textbooks were almost never plain reproductions. Elements of Ramism were considered autonomously and were mixed with other systems of philosophy and communication to various degrees.