Reading English Ramist Logic Books as Early Modern Emblem Books: The Case of Abraham Fraunce

Abstract

Historians of dialectical studies have long dismissed Ramist dialectic as rhetoricized logic in large measure because Ramist logic books exemplify logical principles with passages from oratory, poetry, and the Bible. These rhetorical illustrations consistently figure the logical abstractions in highly visual, concrete, and ekphrastic images and, thus, they often serve as “speaking pictures” for the Aristotelian taxonomies and nomenclature. The Ramist logic book might profitably be understood as bimedial, much like an emblem book, and its modus legendi a dynamic act whose end is acquiring conceptual knowledge. Focusing on the dialectical and emblematic writings of the Ramist Abraham Fraunce, this essay explores the extent to which Ramist habits of mind move between verbal thinking and visual thinking—move between words and word-pictures—to grasp the logical concepts printed on the pages of the popular dialectics.

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