The past couple of years have witnessed a surge of interest in the vernacular subcurrents in philosophical discourse during the Renaissance period, as testified by volumes such as Vernacular Aristotelianism in Italy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century (2016), edited by Luca Bianchi, Simon Gilson, and Jill Kraye, and Marco Sgarbi's survey of vernacular logic in Renaissance Italy, The Italian Mind (2014). The volume under review, which is a reworked version of a PhD dissertation that was defended at the University of Tübingen in 2013, ties in with this development. The volume centers on the emergence of German vernacular logic, presenting a discussion of the four earliest treatises on logic to be published in Low German: Ware Dialectica (1533) by Ortholph Fuchsberger, Dialectica deutsch by Wolfgang Büttner (1574), Dialectica verdeutscht by Friedrich Beurhus (1587), and Logica, das ist Vernunfftkunst by Goswin Wasserleiter (1590).

All four authors wrote in the humanist tradition. Fuchsberger and Büttner were influenced by Philipp Melanchthon, while the treatises by Beurhus and Wasserleiter, two products of late sixteenth-century Philippo-Ramism, also bear the stamp of Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus). These four treatises together constitute something of a curiosity, for, after Wasserleiter saw his Logica through the press, it was not until just over a century later that the next German vernacular account of logical theory—Christian Thomasius's Einleitung in die Vernunftlehre (1691)—was published. This oddity may be the reason why they have been the subject of scholarly debate ever since the Munich logician Carl Prantl, known for his monumental four-volume Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande (1855–70), published a paper on Fuchsberger and Büttner in the Abhandlungen der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1856. The present volume is nonetheless the first attempt to discuss the earliest phases of the development of Low German vernacular logic in a monograph-length study.

As Matthias Ernst explains in the introduction to the volume, his inquiry focuses on four core issues: (1) the question of language, or the motives behind the choice for German rather than Latin as both the object language and metalanguage of logic; (2) the logical systems (if they are worthy the name) set out in these treatises; (3) the principles behind the process of crafting a Low German vocabulary suited to conveying notions that were elaborated in the Latin tradition; and (4) the nature and aims of dialectic, its relation to logic and rhetoric, as well as its place in the spectrum of the sciences. Ernst argues (correctly, I believe) that the importance of this corpus of texts for the history of logic lies not so much in their conceptual or logical originality, which is indeed slight, but rather in the fact that they present dialectic as a device suitable to regulate everyday argumentative discourse—he repeatedly speaks of the “Pragmatisierung der Dialektik”—thus remolding it into “argumentation theory” avant la lettre. Also, due to its emphasis on the rationale behind the vernacularization of Latin terminology, the book is able to show that at least some Renaissance logicians were sensitive to the universality of logical theory, which they were convinced could be successfully described in an artificially regimented syntax of both Latin and the vernacular precisely because it was not bound to any language in particular.

The book is lucidly written and well structured, yet would have benefited from a more profound engagement with the scholarly literature on Renaissance logic. Ernst relies almost exclusively on work published in German, neglecting most of the studies on humanist logic written in any other language, including English. Nevertheless, the volume is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on sixteenth-century logic and will be of interest to anyone working on the history of translation studies, the history of logic, and, especially, the history of argumentation theory.