Using as examples the writings of Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, founding ministers of the First Church of Hartford, Connecticut, this article shows how influential thinkers in early seventeenth-century England and New England saw the world around them through the filters of the Ramist philosophy of Alexander Richardson. It argues that Richardsonian Ramism produced theology and preaching that was less "biblical" and more "Calvinist" than has been conventionally thought. Abstract Using as

more »

... es the writings of Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, founding ministers of the First Church of Hartford, Connecticut, this article shows how influential thinkers in early 17 th -century England and New England saw the world around them through the filters of the Ramist philosophy of Alexander Richardson. It argues that Richardsonian Ramism produced theology and preaching that was less "biblical" and more "Calvinist" than has been conventionally thought. hermeneutics Seeing the World through Ramist Eyes: the Richardsonian Ramism of Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone Important research by Rick Kennedy and Thomas and Lucia Knoles once again reminds students of early New England of the importance of Ramism. Antiquarians have long known that Harvard students were routinely expected to purchase thick blank books into which they made handwritten copies of manuscript textbooks provided by their tutors. Those tutors believed that the transcription process, if conscientiously undertaken, would not only provide a student with a personal copy for subsequent study but also help him master -and even memorize -what the text had to say. After cataloging and carefully examining these "student-transcribed texts," Kennedy and the Knoles found that a notable "quantity and variety" of them had originally been written by followers of the French philosopher and rhetorician Peter Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515-72), leading them to emphasize "Ramism's intellectual authority" throughout Harvard's entire first century. i Such a conclusion could scarcely come as a shock to any serious student of the printed literature of 17 th -century New England. Along with covenant theology and "preparationism," Ramism had formed the backbone of Perry Miller's influential thesis that the ministers of early New England were breaking away from the debilitating influence of "Calvinism." In the first two chapters of his masterful The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Miller had shown how the self-regarding Augustinian God always retained a potential to act arbitrarily, to break through any reasonable limits on his behavior. In the rest of the book, Miller described how New Englanders