314 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
studies taught at that university. After a spirited engagement, 
Orleans is defeated, and the Muse of Poetry goes into hiding. 
The author of the poem concludes with the optimistic reflection 
that the next generation would surely see the futility of logic, 
and return to the study of belles lettres. His hopes were not 
to he realized. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Or¬ 
leans had become the seat of a famous university of law. When 
Petrarch was a boy, the few students of arts who still studied 
at Orleans apparently had forgotten the ancient poets, and were 
lost in the “labyrinth of Aristotle.” 
Thus, as the universities increased in importance, the classics 
declined, and therefore did not find a place in the curriculum 
of the new institutions. Here and there, learned men still 
read them, and even some students at universities may not have 
given them up entirely. Thus we have a note-hook containing 
comments on the Georgies of Virgil, and a fragment of Seneca, 
written by a student at Toulouse in the thirteenth century. 1 
After all has been said, however, the general disregard of the 
classics at the early universities marks the last half of the thir¬ 
teenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth as one of 
the very dreariest periods for classical learning. Petrarch, 
“the morning-star of the Renaissance,” 2 stands out so clearly 
because it was darkest just before the dawn. 
We are now ready to consider more specifically the causes for 
this neglect. All too often the whole blame for it has been 
laid at the door of scholasticism, that magic term which has 
been used to explain such a multitude of sins. The explanation 
is not quite so simple. Many causes combined to bring about 
the decline. I shall consider them under the following heads: 
(1) Strict clerical feeling against profane and, in particular, 
indecent profane literature; (2) Popularity in the schools of 
good medieval Latin literature; (3) Renewed interest in 
science; (4) Rise of the lucrative studies of medicine and law 
(including ars dictaminis ) ; (5) Increasing popularity of logic 
which led to scholastic philosophy and theology. 
1 Catalogue General des Mss. Tome VII Paris, 1885, p. 459. No. 
811 (I 324). Tlie University of Toulouse was founded 1229. 
2 Sandys —A History of Classical Scholarship (1906) p. 678. 
