Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/10

vi gratitude to the trustees for thus enabling me to begin a course of work which I have carried on ever since. I settled myself then at Leipzig in the autumn of 1881, entered the university, and was 'promoted' doctor of philosophy in the following January. I started my own work by reading John of Salisbury, but soon saw that he could not stand as a beginning. I had become acquainted with the venerable Gotthard Lechler, one of the professors in the theological faculty of the place and superintendent in the reformed church, a man well-known in England for his pioneer studies of Wycliffe. He recommended me to read Hermann Reuter's Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, and I took his advice. It would not indeed be true to say that I learned much from Reuter's exaggerated and often distorted presentment of facts; but I found his references useful, and in planning the first half of my book I followed pretty closely the scheme of his. But it seemed to me that the field which Reuter surveyed needed an introduction, and in writing this I derived many suggestions from the essay on The Schools of Charles the Great by James Bass Mullinger, whom in after-years I had the pleasure of numbering among my friends.

Not much of this work was done at Leipzig. In the spring of 1882 I removed to Zurich, where I took quarters in a cottage at Riesbach about a mile out of the town. There I had the advantage of access to two libraries well-equipped for my special purposes. Both were established in disused churches; the town library in the Wasserkirche, close by what was then the uppermost bridge over the Limmat, and the university library in the quire of the Dominican church high up on the Hirschengraben. From these two libraries I enjoyed