Page:Science and medieval thought. The Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18, 1900 (IA sciencemedievalt00allbrich).pdf/116

110 The great University of Paris, which through- out the Middle Ages had been the heart of Christendom, the centre of its life and heat, which in the fourteenth century was at its splendid culmination, and which had meddled with no feeble hand even in the State, was waning even in the fifteenth century, when France was devastated by war and rapine and her schools were emptied. This University, which had savagely condemned Joan of Arc, and sent Nicholas Midi to preach a solemn sermon at the stake, "pro Joannæ salutari admonitione et populi ædificatione," in the sixteenth century came out of the religious wars stripped of its endowments, and deserted by its students; its curriculum was crassly conservative, its philosophy buckram, its theology a petrifac- tion; its forty colleges were closed, grass grew in its courts, and its public disputations were abased to the decorous apostasy of the freethinker. Montpellier was dominated by realism (vitalism). Francis Bacon had done better to have gone with Harvey to Padua; almost in the year of the publication of the De motu cordis, the Par- liament of Paris issued an edict that no teacher should promulgate anything contrary to the ac- cepted doctrines of the ancients.