Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FIFTEENTH AND
SIXTEENTH CENTURIES
E. Jennifer Ashworth
INTRODUCTION
The story of logic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is very much the story of
institutional change. Logic remained at the heart of the university curriculum for
students in faculties of arts throughout Europe, but there were significant changes
both in the curriculum as a whole and in the approach to logic, particularly with
respect to the textbooks used and to the style in which they were written. I say
‘style’ rather than ‘language’, for while it is true that the first known vernacular
logics appeared in Germany in 1534, in Italy in 1547, in France in 1555, and in
England in 1551, 1 this development, which was partly a result of printing having
made book ownership possible for a wider range of people, had little to do with
the universities, where education was and continued to be strictly in Latin at least
until the end of the seventeenth century. 2 The textbooks, the written and spoken
exercises, the lectures, the disputations were all in Latin, and ability to handle
Latin was the entrance requirement. There are two aspects of this use of Latin
that I would like to emphasize. First, it meant that university members were part
of one European culture, including the European book trade. Just as manuscripts
circulated widely in the fifteenth century, so printed texts circulated widely in the
late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Second, it meant that university members
worked in a semi-artificial second language which was no one’s mother tongue,
and which mainly survived in the Roman Catholic Church and in educational
institutions. 3 During the later middle ages, Latin’s artificiality took the form of
the production of a special technical language for the discussion of logic and logical
grammar. With humanism and its emphasis on the study of the language and
literature of Classical Greek and Latin, a different kind of artificiality appeared,
1 For a discussion of various aspects of language during the Renaissance, see Luce Giard, “Du
latin médiéval au pluriel des langues, le tournant de la Renaissance”, Histoire Epistémologie
Langage 6 (1984), 35–55. On p. 48 she gives a table of the dates at which grammatical and
logical texts in the vernacular first appeared in various European countries, and I have used her
material here.
2 Ong has emphasized the unread look of the surviving vernacular texts as opposed to the
dog-eared and annotated Latin texts: see W.J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983 [first printed in 1958]), p. 14.
3 See Giard, “Du latin médiéval”, p. 38.