Review: Ramism and the Reformation of Method: The Franciscan Legacy in Early Modernity By Simon J. G. Burton

by on October 30, 2025 | Comment

Philosophy and the way that we frame issues has always played an important role in expressing the truth. We have an “apparatus” to our thought. We use certain conventions to be able to articulate what we mean even in theology. Whether we know it or not, those explanatory conventions usually come in some measure from a form of philosophy.

During the Reformation and the period of Post-Reformation Orthodoxy, the same was true. Even as the Reformers and the Reformed aimed simply to explain biblical truth, they did so by drawing upon various philosophical premises and methods. One of the methods that came to prominence was Ramism.

Peter Ramus was a French Protestant who was eventually martyred in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. In his career, however, he was known for his attempt to revise philosophical method in a simplified approach to philosophical issues, which became known as Ramism. As has previously been documented, many of the later Reformed theologians—especially those in England, Scotland, and Ireland—implemented Ramist tools in developing categories of Reformed orthodoxy.

Simon Burton’s volume, Ramism and the Reformation of Method, takes a deeper dive into the history of Ramism among the Reformation schools of thought. This book is encyclopedic in its grasp of Ramism’s spread and adoption during the Post-Reformation period; Burton has seemingly left no stone unturned in tracking down the appearance of Ramism throughout major centers of Reformed thought.

Burton presents Ramism as a development of Franciscan ideas about realism. The philosophical position of realism teaches, contrary to nominalism, that the world is not merely a construct of human convention nor even a product of God’s voluntarist decree that had no rationale for making creation to be as it is. Rather, Franciscan theologians were committed to the notion that the structures of created reality reflect God himself.

Sometimes, the Ramist approach leaned upon ideas of Scotist univocity. A univocal understanding of the Creator-creature distinction contends that God and creatures exist in the same way, but that God is just better. For example, a univocal view would say that God and humans know in the same way: God’s knowledge simply surpasses ours because he knows more—namely, everything.

Burton draws out how Reformed theologians often modified these Scotist notions that came bundled with Ramism by way of an eclectic appropriation of Thomist views of analogy. This approach of analogy affirms a real Creator-creature distinction wherein God exists, knows, and in every respect acts in a qualitatively different way than us. Still, this paradigm belongs to a realist outlook. So, Ramist theologians were often wrestling with the best way to express these truths.

Burton masterfully focuses on how Ramism was transmuted at an institutional level, showing how Ramism appeared in university curricula and in the development of textbooks in various schools. These arguments show fine-grained historical skill at analyzing how ideas spread through faculty and showed up in the teaching remit. Burton also carefully examines instances where Ramism met resistance at some universities. In this respect, he brings out some of the controversial aspects of Ramism.

Despite the serious intellectual and investigative strength in this volume, some features make it less useful than it could have been. Both features worth noting relate to Burton’s tendency to focus on particular details rather than synthesis.

First, readers who have no previous familiarity with Ramism will find this book very challenging. Burton provides no survey sketch of what constitutes Ramism as a philosophy or as a method. Some glimpses appear within discussions about how specific aspects of Ramism relate to other paradigms. Still, even as someone with previous experience conducting specialist investigations into Ramism, Burton seemed to presume a lot of knowledge even from me to be able to follow his discussions. He demands a lot from his readers and does not help us as much as he could have. Though it may demonstrate that Ramism was responsible for reform in method, this work may leave the reader with the question: What is Ramism? Burton needed to provide a bit of synthesis at the outset to help us understand what Ramism is as a whole picture so that we could follow the ways that more specific Ramist premises bounced in various contexts and circumstances.

Second, Burton also needed a fuller ending synthesis. This book masterfully traces how Ramism appears in various contexts and situations. It is less clear about the significance of these appearances. If Ramism was a method that aimed at reform, what reform happened? How did things change because Ramism showed up in these places and because these theologians implemented it in the ways they did. Burton has a comprehensive understanding of the background, versions, and development of Ramism in relation to intellectual paradigms and various institutions. Despite his obvious mastery of these details, his book does not paint a clear picture of why it matters to our understanding of history that Ramism appeared in these ways and related to other philosophical methods in discreet ways as different thinkers expressed it. One of the clearest manifestations of this weakness is that the book has no holistic conclusion. The ending paragraph of the final chapter hints toward a general conclusion, but a project of this scope really needed a more extensive synthesis of its findings and their broader significance.

©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.

Simon J. G. Burton, Ramism and the Reformation of Method: The Franciscan Legacy in Early Modernity, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford University Press, 2024).

RESOURCES

Heidelberg Reformation Association
1637 E. Valley Parkway #391
Escondido CA 92027
USA
The HRA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization

Subscribe to the Heidelblog today!


Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comments are welcome but must observe the moral law. Comments that are profane, deny the gospel, advance positions contrary to the Reformed confession, or that irritate the management are subject to deletion. Anonymous comments, posted without permission, are forbidden. Please use a working email address so we can contact you, if necessary, about content or corrections.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.