This important study contributes significantly to our understanding of Ramism. Since the pioneering work of Samuel Elliot Morrison and Perry Miller, Anglophone scholars have too often treated Ramism as an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, closely associated with puritans. Walter Ong's immensely influential work on Ramus, Hotson argues, actually impeded historical understanding: by treating Ramism as an epiphenomenon of the shift from manuscript to print culture, Ong drew attention away from the reasons that Petrus Ramus's reforms were so attractive—especially, Hotson shows, in the small Reformed Protestant states of northwestern Germany.

Many historians of humanism and philosophy have held Ramus in contempt for his lack of originality, his turn away from classical texts, and his decidedly mediocre intellect. While Hotson recognizes that Ramus was an “intellectual lightweight,” this only sharpens his interest in Ramism: why, in the Reformed Protestant world of the Wetterau counties and other small principalities and free cities, did this lightweight prevail over so many heavyweights? Hotson easily dispatches the broad, general explanations that have been offered: not only Ong's explanation, but also claims that link Ramism to Calvinism. Ramus's approach to dialectic caught on in some Reformed Protestant communities long before his own conversion to Protestantism, while it was generally rejected in other parts of the broader Calvinist world, including Heidelberg, the intellectual center of German Reformed Protestantism. Moreover, Hotson shows, Ramism became more confessional from the 1580s onward as Johannes Piscator and others increasingly added scriptural examples with a Reformed bent to their textbooks. Its association with Calvinism was a consequence of its success, not a cause.

Hotson moves away from broad-brush history toward the “specific,” “concrete,” and “practical” reasons that Ramism spread in particular communities. He finds that Ramism prevailed in small states that did not have the resources or prestige to support a university. Those states' schools, such as the famous school at Herborn in the county of Nassau-Dillenburg, did not need to prepare students to follow the traditional university arts curriculum. Hotson offers a refreshingly positive take on the value of Ramist reforms in light of the limits of traditional humanist pedagogy. Ramus and his followers strove to introduce students quickly and methodically to the basic concepts in each subject, on the basis of newly composed textbooks, relegating the classics to a secondary role. They aimed to produce courtiers and administrators rather than scholars.

Less bound by tradition than universities, without entrenched interests to react against innovation, and serving a clientele that was interested most of all in fast, effective education, Herborn and other Reformed academies quickly adopted Ramus's pedagogical innovations. Editions and abridgements of Ramus's works poured from presses serving those schools, followed by the first original textbooks in fields that had earlier been taught through commentary on authoritative classical texts. But Ramus's followers were not blind to his failings. Rather, they adopted his goals while refining his methods and extending them to more disciplines.

This “semi-Ramism” did not remain static. Instead, Hotson usefully characterizes it as a “tradition” that underwent substantial change in response to pragmatic pedagogical demands. From its beginning, the Herborn school's curriculum was “Philippo-Ramist,” drawing on the pedagogical works of Philipp Melanchthon as well as Ramus. Bartholomaeus Keckermann, brought up on Ramist dialectic, came to appreciate the virtues of Aristotle and to partially reject Ramus during his university studies at Wittenberg and Heidelberg. In particular, as a theology student he needed to draw on Aristotle's syllogistic logic and his analysis of fallacies, which Ramus had neglected. But Keckermann encountered Aristotle through the systematized approach of Jacopo Zabarella, and his own “methodological Peripateticism,” with its emphasis on the most direct and expeditious way to teach philosophy, which was firmly within the pragmatic, utilitarian “post-Ramist” tradition.

The tradition culminated in the Encyclopaedia (the first work so titled) of Johann Heinrich Alsted, which appeared in two forms: a 1620 version giving an overview of an advanced course in philosophy, and a 1630 version, now in seven volumes, which attempted to cover the whole of the arts and sciences. Hotson devotes the final third of his book to exploring the genesis, structure, and implications of Alsted's encyclopedia, the culmination of the post-Ramist German tradition. Though Alsted lacked collaborators in the usual sense of the term, the work is best seen as a “collective achievement” in its dependence on earlier work within the tradition.

Alsted's work is philosophically eclectic to the point of incoherence. But this unsystematic philosophy was contained within a “pedagogical systema.” Alsted structured the Encyclopaedia according to the order he considered proper for teaching, an order rooted in the Renaissance notion of commonplaces. Students were first introduced to the praecognita, the background knowledge required to approach any particular discipline. They then approached the compendia (or, for more advanced students, the systemata), guides to the discipline containing its precepts, rules, and brief commentaries. Following in his subject's footsteps, Hotson deftly illustrates the sources and development of Alsted's system with carefully constructed synoptic figures as well as textual exposition. And as he shows, Alsted's decision to expand his work's scope to include every discipline ultimately led to failure. The final section of the 1630 Encyclopaedia contained a “bundle of disciplines” (including, among others, dipnosophistica, the art of dinner-table conversation) that could not be accommodated within the work's structure. Alsted's attempt to systematize everything led to the dissolution of his system.

As Alsted reached that point, his world had plunged into the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War. Yet this was not necessarily a tragedy for the world of learning. In a series of interim conclusions, Hotson argues that the decline of the Ramist academies led to an intellectual diaspora with wide-ranging effects on the intellectual world of the later seventeenth century. First, the Ramist tradition resolutely moved classical texts out of the center of education. Though Ramism originated from within humanism, in this regard it marked a significant departure. Second, the tradition's philosophical eclecticism encouraged a “freedom to philosophize” that was unusual in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Students in the Ramist academies were encouraged to undertake sophisticated comparisons of competing philosophical systems. Even if they often did so at a rudimentary level and reached pedestrian conclusions, Ramism encouraged a way of thinking that left its practitioners much more open to the new philosophies of the seventeenth century than traditional Peripatetics. In this way, Ramism prepared the way for Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and other philosophical innovators.

Commonplace Learning is far from commonplace; it is an exemplary intellectual history. Hotson wears his deep learning lightly. He offers a convincing, nuanced, contextual account of why Ramism succeeded in northwestern Germany and makes a good case for taking Ramism and its ramifications seriously. It is a shame that Oxford University Press's pricing will keep this important book out of the reach of most individual scholars and many libraries, because it deserves to be read by anyone interested in early modern European philosophy and education.