Note - This review was originally written in 2018. This is a redraft. Also forgive the poorly formatted image, I will fix it, when I am not so lazy.
To write a masterful monograph which applies a single disciplinary methodology flawlessly, that is a challenge. But to write a book steeped in elegant multidisciplinarity, rich in erudition, and spiced with some dry wit, that is a feat of its own.
As a student of the premier media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong roots the sometime offputting frenetic energy of his mentor in a grounded, accessible style by crafting an analysis of that nebulous bridge period between the "medieval" and the "modern". Ong takes one individual as a particularly revelatory nexus of parallel historical developments, the educator Petrus Ramus (1515-1575). Across the chapters of this book, Ong he deftly navigates the development and the implications of Ramus' revolutionary approach to pedagogy, printing, humanism, and beyond. I will only briefly introduce some of these dimensions as a teaser of what a reader can find inside Ong's study.
The birth of methodology
One should not forget that in this time Aristotle was king. Ramus was decidedly anti-Aristotelian, as his polemics make no secret of. This rendered him a particularly controversial figure in his own day. The Western university curricula had been thoroughly rooted in Aristotle for several centuries by now, so Ramus' attempt to dethrone "The Philosopher" were not met with cheerful acceptance by the scholastic university system, as one might expect.
The Scholastics (a term Ong finds problematic though useful) decried Ramus for jettisoning Aristotle because it left him with a weak methodus, which can be defined as the way one proceeds through their subject matter.
Method had not been problematized in such a way before. What is a method and how does one arrive at it? This is the quintessential Cartesian or Bacon question (or whichever Enlightenment figure floats your boat). Ong contends that through his disruption of Aristotelian teaching, Ramus unintentionally prompted this modern question of method not just between humanists and scholastics but also within these two camps as well. A question that has haunted the natural and human sciences to this day.
Print and pedagogy
Print technology was still relatively new at this point in time. It had been used for Bibles and then weaponized for the Reformation, but the technological developments surrounding the book had not yet percolated into the realm of pedagogy, until Ramus. Ong argues that Ramus was the first to employ print diagrams and charts as he implemented them in his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic. What medieval philosophy and logicians had taken page upon page, subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, to detail in a way that could only make sense to a reader with a remarkable scrutiny of effort, all this verboseness was easily displaced by the visual diagram. Abstruse concatenations of text gave way to clear, simple, visual diagrams which could make the meaning of a thousand words clear in one picture. A revolutionary achievement in the dissemination of knowledge and the circulation of teaching.
Furthermore, while before many writers perished under the suffocating weight of critics' rebuttals (if not snuffed out by the church), Ramus was remarkably proactive in utilizing print technology to respond to his adversaries. He rapidly and repeatedly printed new editions of his books with corrigienda, supplemental arguments, or refutations of counter-arguments. He incorporated his critics' points into his own work, thus strengthening his own presentation despite others' attempts to negate it.
The printing press also mobilized Ramus' ability to spread his ideas. Rather than being constrained to a network of universities as manuscript culture had been constrained to do, Ramus was an early figure in the transnational republic of letters, becoming a central figure for the Anglophone Puritan movement in England.
And this is not because Ramus possessed a prodigious degree of foresight, at least in Ong's view, but it is because he had particular reformist goals contra scholasticism and was placed at a rare intersection of historical circumstances which allowed him to utilize new scholarly tools in his endeavour.