None among them was more celebrated than Wimpheling. Born at Schlettstadt in 1450, living down to the tumultuous period of the Reformation, he is a fine example of the priest, scholar, teacher, journalist, and patriot, as Germans then conceived of such a figure. Strassburg was proud to own him; Reuchlin became his pupil; with equal heat and eloquence he denounced unworthy friars, the greedy Curia, Jewish financiers, and the “poets” or literary pagans, as he deemed them, who were leading the Renaissance astray from orthodox paths. But education in theory and practice was his proper mission. Of his writings on the subject forty thousand copies, it is estimated, had been thrown into circulation by the year 1500. His Isidoneus Germanicus (Guide of the German Youth), dated 1497, is accounted the first methodical treatise on teaching by a German hand. It was followed three years later by a second work entitled Adolescentia, which marks an era in the science of pedagogics. His pamphlet On the Art of Printing (1507), offers a lively sketch of German culture; warns his countrymen against perils which were then rapidly approaching; and contains a hearty expostulation with princes, nobles, and lawyers, who were unprincipled enough to sacrifice the old freedom of their people to the Roman Law, and the national prosperity to their own covetousness.
Wimpheling offended many interests. As an Alsatian, he sounded the alarm against French ideas and French invasions. It was not to be expected that he would find favour in the eyes of Hebrews whom he charged with usury, of Roman courtiers, Lutheran controversialists, or self-indulgent men of letters, all of whom he assailed. Somewhat narrow in his views, and pedantic or harsh in expressing them, this vigorous partisan has suffered in the esteem of posterity. He may, nevertheless, be classed with Reuchlin as an enthusiastic student whose researches left his religion intact. He desired to see Germany free and independent, neither enslaved to the King of France nor burdened with the hundred gravamina, due to a bad ecclesiastical system of taxation, to papal nepotism, and other enormities, against which he reiterated the strong national protest of 1457. Had such men as Wimpheling been admitted to the confidence of the Roman Court; had their knowledge of German law and custom been turned to good account by Julius II or Leo X, a peaceful reformation might still have been effected. They resisted the encroachments of the new imperial legislation which was destroying the liberties of their towns, and the comfort of their yeomanry; they desired to protect the farmer from the money-lender; they abhorred paganism, even when it brought the gift of culture; and they taught every rank to read, to pray, to make fuller acquaintance with the open Bible. When the Church parted asunder and the War of the Peasants broke out, many must have looked up to Wimpheling as a true prophet. But his day was gone by.
Meanwhile, the clergy had education in their hands. Scholars flocked wherever Churchmen ruled, along the Rhine as in Rome itself; freedom to learn, to teach, to print, was unbounded. The greatest of medieval Universities had been Paris. Not to pursue its earlier and informal beginnings, it had grown up on the Isle de la Cite since 1155, when the Abbot of Ste Genevieve appointed a Chancellor whose duty it was to license teachers of schools in that district. Its statutes were compiled about 1208; its first appearance as a corporation is traced to Innocent III and the year 1211. In perpetual conflict with Chancellor, Bishop, and Cathedral-chapter, the University owed its triumph to the Popes, one of whom, Gregory IX, in his bull Parens Scientiarum of 1231, established the right of the several Faculties to regulate their own constitution. Down to the Great Schism in 1378, the Pontiffs were on amicable terms with Paris and did not encourage the erection of chairs of theology elsewhere, except in Italy, where they were introduced at Pisa, Florence, Bologna, and Padua. But they encouraged the Faculties of Roman or Canon Law on the pattern of Bologna, as extending their own jurisdiction. With a divided papacy came the rise of Gallicanism, already foreshadowed by the writings of Occam and Marsilius of Padua, the Defensor Pacts. It was Paris that directed the antipapal measures of Constance and Basel. The Holy See replied by showing favour to other academies such as Cologne, which from its foundation in 1388 had always been ultramontane. Some four-and-twenty Universities were established during the period under review, of which those of Wittenberg and Frankfort-on-the-Oder were the last. That their organisation was not independent of the Church, or opposed to its authority, is clear on the evidence of the diplomas and papal bulls to which they owe their origin. Even Wittenberg, though set up by an imperial decree, received an endowment from Alexander VI; and the Curia showed everywhere remarkable zeal in helping forward the new centres of learning.
In France, Poitiers was founded by Charles VII in 1431, by way of retort on Paris which had declared for the English King. Caen, Bordeaux, Nantes disputed the monopoly of the French capital, which was further lessened by long and venomous wranglings between the Realist divines who were conservative in temper as they were Roman in doctrine, and the Nominalists, or King-and-Council men, determined at all costs to support the Crown. Prague, also, which had become the Studium Generale of Slavonia, drew to itself students from Paris; and Louvain exercised no small influence even on the banks of the Seine. A striking episode is the journey of Wessel to Paris (1452) in the hope of converting from their Nominalist errors his fellow-countrymen, Henry van Zomeren and Nicholas of Utrecht. But they converted him from Realism; Wessel adopted the philosophy of Plato and plunged into the quarrels of the day as to the extent of the Pope’s jurisdiction and the abuses of the Curia. He lived in his new home sixteen years. Among his associates were Guillaume de Phalis, John of Brussels, and Jean Haveron the Picard, who in 1450 became Rector of the University. In 1473 Wessel after a tour in Italy returned to Paris. That was the year in which Louis XI proscribed the doctrines of Nominalism as unedifying to the Church, dangerous to faith, and unfitted for the training of youth. That Occam’s principles ended in a system sensuous at once and sceptical, it would not be easy to deny; and this consideration furnished a sufficient motive, though by no means the only one on which its adversaries went. All professors were now bound by oath to teach the old scholastic tradition. Jean Bochard, Bishop of Avranches, who had been the adviser of Louis in this proceeding, still however sought the aid of Wessel; it is said that the Flemish divine was appointed Rector and by judicious measures restored the credit of the great School, endangered during a long intellectual anarchy. Peace was secured; the edict which forbade the teaching of Nominalist views was repealed in 1481. Reuchlin studied Greek in Paris, where the first professor of that language had been nominated in 1458; and in the College Montaigu Erasmus underwent those experiences of which he has left us so amusing an account. But the Renaissance can scarcely be described as having made a commencement in France until Charles VIII came back from his Italian expedition; its foremost leader and representative, the mighty-mouthed Rabelais, belongs to a period many years beyond the limits of this chapter. Neither saints nor scholars adorned an age which wasted itself in political strife, in contentions between the Crown-lawyers and the champions of Church-privileges, in the abortive Council of Pisa, in the enforcement or the revocation of the Pragmatic Sanction. No serious thought of reform occupied the public mind in France. Local synods denounced abuses which they were powerless to remedy. But though Erasmus did not conceive a high opinion of German culture in his youth, the new era had dawned with Agricola and his contemporaries across the Rhine.
An immense number of schools, elementary or advanced, are known to us from these years as existing in German regions. Nine Universities were opened. Brandenburg alone lagged behind; Berlin had no printing-press until 1539. Cologne, which was Realist and Dominican, the first among older foundations, still deserved its fame; Ortuin Gratius, despite the Letters of Obscure Men, was not only a good scholar but in his own way liberal-minded. John von Dalberg, appointed in 1482 Curator of Heidelberg and Bishop of Worms, divided