Gabriel Harvey Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kendrick W. Prewitt

Critical Essay by Kendrick W. Prewitt

SOURCE: Prewitt, Kendrick W. “Gabriel Harvey and the Practice of Method.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 39, no. 1 (winter 1999): 19-39.

In the following essay, Prewitt explores Harvey's commitment to his pragmatic “Method,” based on the philosophy of Peter Ramus, despite its controversial nature and his fear that it was a liability.

One of Gabriel Harvey's first published writings as a young scholar was the Ode Natalitia, a 1574 elegy for the French Protestant martyr and controversial logician Pierre de la Ramée (Peter Ramus). In this elegy, “Method” serves as “a heavenly virgin who directs the goddesses of the Arts” (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, and geometry, all reformed by Ramus), and leads them, and subsequently the “studious Youth,” to the temple of Apollo.¹ “Method” plays the central role in the elegy, as a comforter of the “unreformed” arts of music, astronomy, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine, and as an...
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