The past several decades have enjoyed a resurgence of interest in early modern Reformed scholasticism and theological method, not least due to the work of Richard Muller. Historical scholars and lay readers alike have come to appreciate something of the breadth of the early modern Reformed tradition. Most educated readers now rightly reject the ‘Calvin and the Calvinists’ thesis, which erroneously contended that the post-Reformation use of scholastic method in theology represented a corrupting of the Reformation’s legacy. In fact, Reformed scholasticism represented the maturation of the Reformation, enabling the sophisticated and precise expression of Protestant thought fit for academic instruction and polemical engagement with Protestantism’s learned Roman Catholic opponents. Yet this important correction of older scholarly opinion has proven so persuasive that it has led to over-simplifications of its own. For example, it has become virtually axiomatic in discussions of early modern Reformed theology that one must sharply distinguish between form and content, (scholastic) method and (Reformed) theology. Of course, as has often been observed, form and content are not so neatly separable, the form of one’s theological formulation having far-reaching effects on the scope, interests, and character of one’s theology. Moreover, Simon Burton’s superb new study demonstrates that the early modern period knew many intellectuals who sought not only to reform the material content of theology but also belonged to a long tradition of Augustinian and Franciscan Christian Philosophy, which sought to reform method itself.

Burton’s study focuses on the philosophy of controversial French pedagogical reformer Peter Ramus (1515–1572), seeking to locate Ramus’s thought in its intellectual context and to trace its early modern reception. The introduction alone repays close reading, presenting Ramism as the convergence of the four great intellectual streams of Augustinian and Franciscan Platonism, Lullism, Christian Humanism, and Reformed Scholasticism. Ramism embraced the Augustinian combination of realism (real universals), exemplarism (‘reality mirrors and participates in the divine reality of God himself’), and illuminationism (the manifestation of divine light in creation which radiates truth to human minds) (pp. 3, 7). A fundamental aspect of Burton’s framing is the contrast between the Augustinian Christian Philosophy of Franciscans like Bonaventure—which sought to harmonise theology, philosophy, and method—and the Christian Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas, which, for all its Augustinian and Platonist influence, ‘sharply demarcated philosophy from theology’ and ‘showed little appetite for a scriptural encyclopaedism or logic’ (p. 9). Thus, while scholastics distinguished method from theology, a competing Augustinian and Franciscan tradition of Christian Philosophy (notably exemplified by Ramism) viewed them as inextricably intertwined. Burton’s work illuminates Ramus’s ambitious attempt to reform method in accord with the divine dialectical nature of reality, along with how his legacy was variously transformed by his intellectual heirs.

The first two chapters focus on Ramus himself. Chapter 1 addresses the nature of Ramus’s dialectic (logic). Ramist method has long been best known for its famous branching diagrams, dividing subject matter into their constituent parts. Where many scholars have treated Ramus’s method as superficially pragmatic, Burton persuasively argues that Ramus’s dialectical method had Neoplatonic metaphysical underpinnings, an understanding which Ramus sustained throughout his career’s work. Ramism was no mere technique for arranging content, as it is often regarded. For Ramus, it represented the one true method of all learned discourse, mirroring the realist structure of things in themselves and thus replacing Aristotelian metaphysics as the science of being qua being. Burton’s argument for Ramism’s realism is bolstered by his highlighting the interconnections between the dialectical, mathematic, and mystical currents in Ramus’s outlook, its continuities with Fabrist and Cusan thought, and Ramus’s participation in an Augustinian and Franciscan tradition of Platonic Christian Philosophy. Chapter 2 examines Ramus’s ambitious pedagogical reform program, which sought to apply his dialectic to the reform of academic knowledge and, by this means, to the reform of society.

The remaining seven chapters trace the development, modification, and integration of Ramism into subsequent approaches to method, constituting a variegated but continuous tradition of Christian Philosophy. This tradition ran parallel to and often overlapped with the tradition of Reformed scholasticism mapped out by Muller. Successive chapters treat the Philippo-Ramist syntheses of the Herborn theologians Caspar Olevian (1536–1587) and Johannes Piscator (1546–1625), the Cambridge Ramism of Alexander Richardson (d.1621) and William Ames (1576–1633), and the synthetic trinitarian and Bonaventurian methods of Amandus Polanus (1561–1610) and Stephanus Szegedinus (1515–1572). The book concludes with dedicated chapters on the approaches of four intellectual giants, treating the ‘methodical Peripateticism and encyclopaedism’ of Bartholomäus Keckermann (c.1572–1609), the trinitarian and apocalyptic encyclopaedism of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), the trinitarian universal reformist vision of Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld (1605–1655), and the pansophic philosophy of Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670). These figures emerge as bound together by the broad Platonist dynamics of their thought, their pursuit of exemplarist, trinitarian, participationist, and scripturalist approaches to logic, method, and metaphysics, and an orientation toward the encyclopedic encapsulation of all knowledge conceived as the recovery of Edenic knowledge of God and creation.

Burton’s dense and erudite work promises to have transformative significance for the study of early modern Reformed theological method. Where scholars have primarily focused on Reformed continuities with Aristotelian, scholastic, and Thomist traditions, Burton highlights the understudied but perversive influence of Platonic, Franciscan, Bonaventurian, and Scotist streams of thought, especially as embodied in Ramism. This should facilitate more nuanced discussions of notions like ‘Reformed Thomism’, ‘Reformed scholasticism’, and ‘Christian Platonism’, which are often discussed rather simplistically. For example, Burton’s work complicates Craig Carter’s influential advocacy of the ‘Christian Platonism’ central to Christianity’s ‘great tradition’. He demonstrates Platonism’s variegated reception and highlights how prominent figures that Carter marginalizes from his account of this tradition (Bonaventure, Scotus) exhibited a more thoroughgoing Christian Platonism than those Carter places at its center (Aquinas). Burton’s volume also assists scholars in distinguishing Ramist approaches to Reformed theology from broader patterns of Reformed scholasticism.

Burton’s study achieves its goals admirably while opening up vast avenues for future research. Much work remains to be done, for example, on Ramus’s thought and its reception among the puritans of England and New England. The influence of Bonaventure and Scotus on Reformed thought requires far greater scholarly attention. More broadly, the Augustinian notion of ‘Christian Philosophy’—contrasted with more Thomistic and scholastic approaches—warrants further development and exploration. No student of early modern Reformed theology can afford to neglect this important work.