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The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it outlines the hermeneutical and pedagogical debate around Ramism against the background of the academies of Helmstedt, Zamość and Alba Iulia at the turn of the seventeenth century, and it therefore offers a contextualized reading of an intellectual exchange that spread long and far, from the Baltic to Transylvania. On the other, it also reconstructs the mutual influence of logic and natural philosophy in the late Renaissance by arguing that the model for their theoretical and curricular interaction is ultimately to be found in the tradition of the Aristotelian science of natural problems. Put in other terms, I aim to discuss the ramifications of knowledge communities around 1600 from the vantage point of the early modern response to Peripatetic philosophy, especially in areas such as biology, meteorology and logic.
After a brief historiographical survey on the influence of Peter Ramus in East-Central Europe, I offer three case studies, pivoted around different genres (commentaries, treatises, and letters) and culminating in humanist techniques of note-taking. First, I look at the Caseliani in Helmsted as a new class of intellectuals, with strong internal ties, who deftly used Lutheran patronage and Zabarella’s printed textbooks to revive Aristotle; secondly, I turn to Adam Burski’s neglected tract, Dialectica Ciceronis, to describe polycentric cultural processes and further reflect on the role of the book trade as an international marketplace promoting alternative socio-epistemic solutions to the challenges of scientific communication; and finally, I sample the letters of Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld, a pupil of Alsted, in search of promising, new strategies to account for intellectual diasporas, scholarly networks, and phenomena of geopolitical distance.
