 A method in the sixteenth century was a way of approaching a given discipline—according to the Paduan school, for example, one properly approached natural philosophy through the logical method of regressus. But Lefèvre believed that this kind of prioritizing of logic over other disciplines undermined the distinctive modes of reasoning proper to each discipline. In the sixteenth century, one of the many uses of the word methodus was to indicate a short cut, perhaps a compendious textbook, by which a student might approach a discipline (Gilbert 1960: 59–60). Indeed, there is some evidence of this usage in Lefèvre’s own circle. Guillaume Gontier, his student and amanuensis, explicitly referred to Lefèvre’s collection of introductions on logic as a “method”, telling readers that