A Postscript on Bodin's Connections with Ramism

Abstract

In an article in this Journal a few years ago,1 it was suggested that the paths of Jean and Peter Ramus must have crossed significantly during Bodin's critical formative years as a student at Paris, when Ramus was at the height of his controversy with the University authorities over his rejection of Aristotelian logic and the development of his own simplified system of dialectic. The article then proceeded to support this hypothesis by an examination of the unmistakable influences of Ramism that may be discerned in Bodin's published works from his commentary on Oppian's Cynegetica of 1555 to his Universae naturae theatrum of 1596. But in the absence of direct evidence it was necessary to infer a probable personal relationship between the two men from the evidence of Bodin's writings and from the fact that he is known to have studied philosophy in Paris for two years during the period when the Ramist controversy was at its height. This hypothesis of a Ramist influence upon Bodin's student years in Paris has now been dramatically corroborated in a most unexpected way. It is both confirmed and made more explicit by the discovery, in the Bywater collection of the Bodleian Library, of a leather-bound volume from Jean Bodin's library,2 which is lettered Iohannes on the front cover and Bodin on the back, and which bears two signatures, apparently those of the future author of the Republique. So far as I am aware this is the first volume from Bodin's library whose existence has become known to scholars of his thought. The contents of the volume afford a small but highly significant insight into the tantalizing darkness that still surrounds Bodin's early life and intellectual formation. Five separate treatises are bound together, as follows: (1) Omer Talon's Academia, together with his In academicum Ciceronis fragmentum explicatio and his In Lucullum commentarii (Paris, 1550); (2) Omer Talon's Rhetorica (Paris, 1551); (3) Omer Talon's In Marci Tul. Cic. partitiones oratorias annotationes (Paris, 1551); (4) Peter Ramus' edition, with commentary, of Cicero's De fato (Paris, 1550); 3 (5) Georgius Valla's commentary on Cicero's De fato. This last work lacks a title-page and has evidently been detached from the work that preceded it.4