i THE DISPUTATION OF PENTECOST 49 



in Paris, where perhaps his Italian writings had made 

 him no longer acceptable, but he desired not to leave 

 it without some recognition of the favour shown him 

 there in the past. The means he adopted was a public 

 disputation, to be held in the Royal Hall of the uni- 

 versity at Pentecost of the year 1586. These disputa- 

 tions of the learned were a delight to the youth of the 

 time, and drew audiences comparable in our own time 

 only to great football or cricket matches. 1 He drew up 

 one hundred and twenty theses against the Peripatetic The 120 

 Philosophy, which still formed the substance of the 

 teaching at the Sorbonne ; and his side was taken up by 

 the rival, more modern, college of Cambray (afterwards 

 the College of France), of which he appears now to 

 have become an associate. 2 It was the custom of the 

 real propounder of the theses to preside at the debate, 

 leaving it to another to act as protagonist, and inter- 

 vening only when the latter's discomfiture was imminent. 

 In this case Bruno chose a young Parisian nobleman of 

 his own following John Hennequin, a Master of Arts 

 but we may well imagine that he did not long keep 

 silent himself. We have no knowledge of how the 

 debate went, but it cannot have been too favourable to 

 Bruno, for he left Paris immediately afterwards. Its 

 date was the 25th of May; Bruno, therefore, left Paris 

 probably in early June 1586. 



The articles, with a note of explanation attached to Criticism of 

 each, and an introduction to the whole (Excubitor, the 

 Awakener) being the address of Hennequin at the 

 beginning of the disputation, but written by Bruno 

 himself were published in Paris and again at Witten- 

 berg. 3 They contain a temperate but powerful criticism 



1 Landseck's Bruno. 2 Vide Op. Lot. vol. iii. Introd. p. xxxix. 



3 Centum et Viginti Articuli De Natura et Mundo, adv. Peripateticos, Paris, 



E 



