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Letterpress printing brought about a revolution of sorts – about twenty million books had been printed by 1500. However, an estimated 77 per cent were in Latin and so inaccessible to all but an elite, 45 per cent were religious, and only 10 per cent scientific or informational. In Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s words, the impact of print may have been as much as anything in “popularising long cherished beliefs, strengthening traditional prejudices and giving authority to seductive fallacies.”⁴⁴⁵

In the half century that followed Gutenberg’s Bible, visual design began to appear in the layout of letterpress books which did have essential meaning in relation to the text. We’re staying with our definition of text here, where the space between the words is a character or grapheme – it’s Unicode U+0020. Spacing words had been a feature of writing in European languages since about the seventh century. Everything else in the design of pages is in our definition visual.

What comes to European letterpress book production between 1454 and about 1500 is a number of essentially visual devices for the architecting of textual meaning: title pages, tables of contents, numbered sections, nested subsections, headings, paragraphs, abstracts, indexes, footnotes, running heads, cross references, concordances, and colophons.⁴⁴⁶

And, that most revolutionary of inventions, the page number, supporting the non-linear readings and affording the reader new scope for agency. This is a radical departure from the role of a listener who remains captive in linear time. None of these visual devices were new to print, but now they became the norm. By visual extension, text became what we might today call hypertext.

Perhaps the most prolific of all early modern authors, Petrus Ramus, comes to prominence in print in the century after Gutenberg. Appointed professor at the University of Paris in 1551, Ramus was a prolific writer of textbooks. Walter Ong, exhaustive chronicler and analyst of Ramus’ legacy, has identified 750 separately published editions in 1,100 separate printings between 1550 and 1650.⁴⁴⁷

Also in the University of Illinois Rare Books Library is a 1636 English translation of Ramus’ Way to Geometry. A table of contents points to a Book IV, “Of A Figure,” commencing on page 32. Arriving at this page we find a section numbered and named, “1. A figure is a lineate bounded on all parts.” Then, “So the triangle is a e 1 … ” and below that, a drawing of a triangle with its three corners labeled a, e, and 1.

In his textbooks, Ramus relies on the visual in ways Gutenberg in his Bible did not. He creates a spatialized architectonics of decomposition, from one visually compartmentalized cell of knowledge to the next, ordered from the simpler ideas to the more complex, and supplemented by the diagrammed taxonomic relationships of main and subsidiary concepts. There is also the multimodal integration of text with image using labels and figure references. Because this is letterpress, the triangles are abstractions, line drawings in their conceptual and abstract generality, not the triangles of concretely instantiated life that in a later era might also be offered by photolithographic or offset printing.

And more on these pages: the form of the textbook; the didactic relationships of author and teacher to student; the multimodal objectivizations of knowledge in mathematics and science. The meaning functions are creatures of their media.

This is Ong’s reading: Ramus leaves us with “simple spatial models” and dichotomies. “Persons, who alone speak (and in whom alone knowledge and science exist), will be eclipsed insofar as the world is thought of as an assemblage of the sort of things which vision apprehends – objects or surfaces.” Of teachers, Ong says, “Instead of carrying on a dialogue in the give-and-take Socratic form, the university don had largely reduced the oral component by converting it into his own classroom monologue, which he produced not as the spirit moved him but on schedule at fixed places and hours. At the same time his interest both in logic and in explicitness, in an ‘object’ (of knowledge) rather than in a ‘subject’ (of discourse), had driven him further still toward the visile pole with its typical ideals of ‘clarity,’ ‘precision,’ ‘distinctness,’ and ‘explanation’ itself – all best conceivable in terms of some analogy with vision and a spatial field.” This was an epistemological revolution, spelling the end of the “evanescent world of discourse.”⁴⁴⁸ Gone are dialectic as to-and-fro interchange, and rhetoric as appeal to persons. Telling replaces dialogue. Fact displaces argument.

Ong does not hold Ramus in terribly high regard. He was “not a great intellectual but a savant,” whose work was “superficially revolutionary but at root highly derivative.” The geometry was just Euclid, its reconstruction in textbook form in Ong’s view intellectually trivial.⁴⁴⁹

Walter Ong, Jesuit priest, does not hide his dislike of Petrus Ramus, a convert to Protestantism in 1561. “The Ramist arts of discourse are monologue arts. They develop the didactic, schoolroom outlook which … tends finally even to lose the sense of monologue in pure diagrammatics.” But the epistemological revolution wrought by the textbook was of enormous significance. Ramism “crowds spatial models into the universe of the mind,” a precursor, for better or for worse, of “the Newtonian revolution, with its stress on visually controlled observation of mathematics, and its curiously silent, nonrhetorical universe.”⁴⁵⁰

“Diagrammatics” is an apt word because it highlights the peculiarity of Ramus’ visual designs of knowledge. Ramus’ Protestantism was hostile to realistic images. The purely textual Word of God might, at most, be supplemented by spatially arranged verses and intertextual concordances. If there were to be diagrams of any kind, Christ’s cross was an abstraction. In his textbook on religion, Ramus quoted the warning in Deuteronomy not to “corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure the likeness of male or female.”⁴⁵¹ The spiritual revolution of Protestantism would smash Catholic statues and stained glass likenesses across Europe.^§MS2.2.1b

For his selective iconoclasm and anti-Catholic apostasy, Ramus was brutally murdered in his rooms at the University during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. His body was thrown from the window, decapitated then cast into the Seine.⁴⁵²

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⁴⁴⁵ Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, 1958 [1976], The Coming of the Book, translated by D. Gerard, London: Verso, pp. 248, 278.

⁴⁴⁶ Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, 1979, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early-Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–54, 105.

⁴⁴⁷ Walter J. Ong, 1958 [1983], Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 5.

⁴⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 8, 9, 151, 155.

⁴⁴⁹ Ibid., p. ix.

⁴⁵⁰ Ibid., pp. 287, 318.

⁴⁵¹ Frances A. Yates, 1966 [1999], The Art of Memory, Volume 3, London: Routledge, p. 236.

⁴⁵² Walter J. Ong, 1958 [1983], Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 29; Frank Pierrepoint Graves, 1912, Peter Ramus and the Educational Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, New York: Macmillan, pp. 105–07.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 166–168. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Petrus Ramus’ “Way to Geometry” §AS1.4.7c