Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/112

 100 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE learned monks zealous for science, of religious poets, of mystic and ascetic writers — men like Herman Appel- dorn (1472), Heinrich von Birnbaum (1473), Herman Grefken (1480), Heinrich von Dissen (1484), and, fore- most of all, Eolewinck's most intimate friend, Peter Blomevenna, whose writings all breathe a spirit of pious enthusiasm and peaceful joy. The second university of the Khenish Provinces, that of Heidelberg, received a new impetus already in the first half of the fifteenth century under Aeneas Sylvius, afterwards Pius II., who, while provost of the Worms Cathedral, was appointed chancellor of the university. During the government of Frederick, Count Palatine (1452), comprehensive reforms were carried out, parti- cularly with regard to philosophical studies. Among the scholastic theologians it was the ' Eealists ' here also who came forward as open-minded promoters of scien- tific research and classical studies ; while the ' Nominal- ists,' on the contrary, drew on themselves the reproach of barren dogmatism and philosophical hair-splitting. Peter Luder, the first Humanist, who began his career of activity in Heidelberg, 1450, was warmly supported by two professors of theology and canon law. One of his pupils was the well-known chronicler and biographer of Frederick, Count Palatine, Matthias von Kemnat, who probably received his earliest education from the Italian Arriginus, one of the Humanists established in the neighbourhood of Culmbach. The actual period of Heidelberg's greatest pros- perity, however, was from the year 1476, in the reign of Philip, Count Palatine (1476), who, himself a cul- tured scholar, used to assemble large numbers of men