Disclosure: I was in the Jesuits for a period of time (1979-1987).
The Gutenberg printing press had emerged in the mid-1450s and had contributed to the rising demand for formal education, as did Renaissance humanism. In general, leading Renaissance humanists venerated three ancient languages: (1) Greek, (2) Latin, and (3) Hebrew. Consequently, King James I (1566-1625) was able to assemble enough Hebrew experts to English the Hebrew Bible and enough Greek experts to English the New Testament for the King James Bible (1611).
Over a period of time, early Jesuit Renaissance educators worked out in Latin the document known as The Ratio Studiorum : The Official [1599] Plan for Jesuit Education, translated and annotated by the American Jesuit classicist Claude Pavur (2005).
The American Jesuit church historian John O'Malley provides an accessible history of the early Jesuits in his 1993 book The First Jesuits.
Now, Ong's family name is English; for centuries, it was spelled "Onge"; it is probably related to the English name "Yonge." Ong's ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams (c.1604-1683) to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 five years before the founding of Harvard College there in 1636.
As an undergraduate at Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University), the Jesuit educational institution in Kansas City, Missouri, Ong majored in Latin (class of 1933 during the Great Depression). Subsequently, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Florissant, Missouri, a distant suburb of St. Louis, in September 1935. As part of his lengthy Jesuit training, Ong earned graduate degrees roughly equivalent to Master's degrees in philosophy (taught in Latin) and in theology (taught in Latin) both from SLU. In addition, he earned a Master's in English at SLU. After he had been ordained a priest in 1946 and had completed his Jesuit training in 1948, he undertook doctoral studies in English at Harvard University in the fall of 1948. In 1949-1950 and again in 1951-1952, Ong received Guggenheim Fellowships in support of his research on the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572). Ramus was an educator at the University of Paris where, a bit earlier, St. Ignatius Loyola had met certain younger students with whom he had started the Jesuit order.
When young Ong, as part of his Jesuit training, was working on his graduate studies in philosophy and English at SLU, he encountered the young Canadian convert to Catholicism Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), who was teaching English at SLU as he continued to work on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation about the history of the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (also known as dialectic) from antiquity in Western culture down to the English Renaissance prose writer and stylist Thomas Nashe (1567-1601).
McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was posthumously published, unrevised but with an editorial apparatus, as the 2006 book The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (born in 1942).
Nashe is one of six of Shakespeare's contemporaries that scholars refer to collectively as the university wits, because of their university educations. The other five are Christopher Marlowe (1564-1606), John Lyly (1553-1606), Robert Greene (1558-1592), Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), and George Peele (1556-1596).
Now, McLuhan served as the director of the American Jesuit Maurice B. McNamee's 1945 doctoral dissertation in English at Saint Louis University titled Francis Bacon's Attitude Toward Grammar and Rhetoric in the Light of the Tradition.
Subsequently, McNamee published the article "Literary Decorum in Francis Bacon" in Saint Louis University Studies (Series A), volume 1, number 3 (1950): pages 1-52.
In any event, an early indication of Ong's own interest in the verbal arts is his 1942 article "The Province of Rhetoric and Poetic" that is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for further Inquiry (2002, pages 175-183).
An early indication of Ong's life-long interest in orality in his 1944 article "Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory" that is also reprinted in An Ong Reader (pages 185-197).
In Ong's 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture, he perceptively, albeit succinctly, discusses both John Lyly and Thomas Nashe (esp. pages 70-71).
Now, at Harvard College in the seventeenth century, the logic of Ramus dominated the course of studies, just as it dominated the course of studies at Cambridge University in East Anglia, when young John Milton (1608-1674) studied there. In contrast to Milton, young William Shakespeare (1564-1616) of Stratford on the Avon did not have a university education, but rather a much more limited formal education in Latin and Greek at the so-called grammar school at Stratford.
Later in Milton's life, he wrote (in Latin) a textbook in logic titled A Fuller Course in the Art of Logic Conformed to the Method of Peter Ramus (Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio, ad Petri Rami Methodum Concinnata ), edited and translated by Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger in volume eight of Yale's Complete Prose Works of John Milton: 1666-1682, edited by Maurice Kelley (1982, pages 206-407). Ong's lengthy introduction (pages 139-205) is reprinted, slightly shortened, as "Introduction to Milton's Logic" in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts (1999, pages 111-141).
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