Petrus Ramus was a French humanist, logician, and educational reformer. A Protestant convert, he was a victim of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
Petrus Ramus
Ramus awaiting his murderers: wood engraving by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, 1840
Arithmeticae libri tres, 1557
St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence directed against the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion. Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Queen Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, the massacre started a few days after the marriage on 18 August of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant King Henry III of Navarre. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.
Painting by François Dubois, a Huguenot painter who fled France after the massacre. Although it is not known whether Dubois witnessed the event, he depicts Admiral Coligny's body hanging out of a window at the rear to the right. To the left rear, Catherine de' Medici is shown emerging from the Louvre Palace to inspect a heap of bodies.
Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots
Charles IX of France, who was 22 years old in August 1572, by François Clouet.
This popular print by Frans Hogenberg shows the attempted assassination of Coligny at left, his subsequent murder at right, and scenes of the general massacre in the streets.
