Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/115

Rh prestige and prosperity, and the national culture unfolded its fairest mediæval flowers, and during this period the Danish youths were particularly fond of going to Paris to study. The university of that city was at that time the most comprehensive and in all respects the most excellent scholastic institution in Europe. Youths from all lands gathered there in large numbers. From the North and especially from Denmark there came many a young man eager to secure the highest degree of scholastic culture that the age afforded. Not unfrequently they would attain high honors abroad and then return to their native country to fill the highest places in the church. This was the case with the renowned archbishops Absalon and Anders Suneson, of whom the latter was for a long time a professor, perhaps even the rector of the University of Paris, a position which on several occasions was filled by Danes. Prom the fourteenth century we know the names of at least four rectors of the University of Paris, who were "de Dacia." That the number of Danes in Paris was comparatively large and conspicuous may be inferred from various circumstances, and among them from the fact that about the middle of the twelfth century there was founded the "Collegium Danicum," the first of its kind, and it continued to exist for more than two hundred years.

Theology and its kindred subjects, particularly philosophy and canonical law, were well nigh the only studies pursued. It was the age of mysticism and scholasticism, and at the universities the scholastic researches, to which the Italian Anselm and the Frenchman Abalärd, the two most eminent ecclesiastical teachers of the middle age, had given the impulse, engrossed the attention of all students. As a matter of course these studies could be of no great benefit either to the heart or the mind. They accepted the doctrine of the church as infallible, established once for all, one in regard to which there was no room for doubt, and they only exerted themselves to secure a sort of external harmony between free thought with Aristotle as the basis and their accepted