Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515-1572) was Regius Professor of Eloquence and Philosophy at the Collège Royal (Paris). Motivated by his pedagogical vocation, he redefined the sphere of the liberal arts, stripping rhetoric of its traditional content. For Ramus rhetoric consisted only of elocutio, and was not a civic form of knowledge, even though it had been considered as such by Italian humanists following the Greco-Roman tradition. Continuing in the scholastic spirit of Northern Europe, Ramus highlighted the pre-eminence of dialectics and consolidated the notion of méthode, which would gain ever more importance, starting in the 17^th century