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• Ramism in the KIngdom of Hungary and in Transylvania

  Gábor Kecskeméti

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  Ramism in the Kingdom of Hungary and in Transylvania. The study reviews the impacts of Ramism on the scholarly, pedagogical, and cultural life of the Kingdom of Hungary and of Transylvania, including the local publications in grammar, rhetoric, homiletics, and logic, and the presence of Ramist considerations and components in domestic education. Judging by the evidence of its reception in Hungary and Transylvania, we can conclude that Ramist influence was present in the main Calvinist institutions, that is, in the colleges at Gyulafehérvár, Kolozsvár, Sárospatak, Várad, and Debrecen during the mid- and late seventeenth century. Such influence affected the whole system of classification of the academic sciences, and elements of Ramism remained detectable until the mid-eighteenth century. More sporadic, but not insignificant, was Ramist influence usually taking a more syncretic form at Lutheran institutions that adhered to essentially Melanchthonian pedagogy.

  Literary works by Hungarian authors with Ramist and, often, Puritan convictions are clearly understandable texts characterized by their conceptual plainness and clarity, which include only a few elements of belletrism, affective attraction, and literary originality in their predominantly rational argumentation. That such texts strive primarily for intellectual rationality is clearly connected with the authors’ Ramist mindsets, because, under a strictly Ramist theoretical framework, only a small number of the taxonomic processes which distinguish literary works from the natural order of precise, objective, rational discourse could be accepted.