In this article, Ong divides his thoughts on the topic into seven sections. In the first section of the article, he asserts that scholars are slowly learning more about the Ramist movement during the Renaissance through an examination of works by Ramus and his disciples, but one work largely ignored is Fouquelin’s La Rhetorique Francoise . . . (1555). This book is, in fact, central to an understanding of the Ramist movement, for it is the companion piece to Ramus’ French Dialectique (1555). The pairing of Fouquelin’s book with a work by Ramus is typical of the Ramist movement, where the separation of logic (dialectic) and rhetoric was taken literally in publishing, and Ong cites a number of paired books published by the English Ramists. Usually, the rhetoric companion to the work on logic consisted of a translation of Omer Talon’s Latin Rhetorica and vernacular examples of the ideas expressed in that work; this is exactly what Fouquelin’s Rhetorique is.
In the second section of Ong’s article, the author explains that while Fouquelin only refers to Ramus’ Dialectique indirectly, he does refer directly to Talon’s Rhetorica and follows Talon and Ramus on several points that prove the connection between all three works: like Talon, Fouquelin claims that “precepts” (rules) are discussed in the book when they really are not, and he uses as examples many of the same French poets Ramus uses in Dialectique. Ong then explains, in the third and fourth sections of the article (which are quite short), how Fouquelin departed from Talon on two issues: he adds a discussion of French poetry (not dichotomizing his classifications of it as most Ramists would but keeping poetry clearly within the category of rhetoric as Ramists would) and adds some discussion of French orthography (spelling).
In the fifth section of the article, Ong returns to the point that Fouquelin, for the most part, followed Talon closely, an action that reveals the Ramists’ commitment to a “universalist” approach to rhetoric. Ong then explains how Ramus separated logic and rhetoric from each other entirely in order to get rid of the logics of probability and in order to make philosophy more accessible to an audience that learned the discipline fairly early in life (a more fully developed explanation of what Ramus did with logic and rhetoric appears in “Hobbes and Talon’s Ramist Rhetoric in England,” “Peter Ramus and the Naming of Methodism,” and in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue). Ong notes that the result of Ramus’ attempt to make philosophy more accessible was an oversimplification of the knowledge gaining process. Ramus, in Ong’s opinion, placed much too much emphasis on the abstract end of the process and ignored the relationship between the material and the abstract.
What is interesting here is that Ong simply mentions the abstract/material dichotomy; he does not conduct an in-depth discussion of it as he does in many of his earlier articles. By this point, it appears that Ong has worked through his ideas about the dichotomy and is clearly focusing on new topics, particularly the influence of Ramus on the rhetorical tradition. In fact, Ong’s publications from the 1950s are dominated by the topic of the Ramist movement. In this section of the article, Ong also points out that when Fouquelin adds his own ideas in Rhetorique, his additions are often aimed at making clearer Ramus’ vision.
In the sixth section of the article, Ong explains that little is known about Fouquelin except that he came from what is now northeast France, was probably born in 1534, and wrote Rhetorique in his early twenties, shortly after he had begun teaching. Then in the last section of the article, Ong argues that the work of Fouquelin shows two things: that the Ramists had a strong “solidarity,” which overrode national boundaries, and the spread of vernacular literature happened more quickly in France than it did in England. Still, vernacular literature on rhetoric was not, in general, in great demand anywhere (the number of Latin editions of books on rhetoric far outnumber those in vernacular languages), and for the most part, Ramus and Fouquelin did not advocate the growth of vernacular literature on rhetoric since they simply restated what had already been said in Latin.