Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III Progress of the Academic War HEN Abelard and his admirers returned from Melun to Paris, they found William's new successor sitting resolutely in the chair of Notre Dame. From some manuscripts of the Story of my Calamities it appears that he had won repute by his lectures on Priscian, the Latin grammarian. He had thus been able to augment the little band who remained faithful to William and to orthodoxy with a certain number of personal admirers. Clearly the episcopal school must be taken by storm. And so, says Abelard, his pen leaping forward more quickly at the recollection, twenty years afterwards, we pitched our camp on the hill of Ste. Genevieve. During the century that preceded the coalescence of the schools into a university, Ste. Genevieve was the natural home of rebellion. Roscelin had taught there. Joscelin the Red, another famous nominalist, was teaching there. The feminists had raised their tabernacle there; the Jews their synagogue. From its physical advantages the hill naturally presented itself to the mind of every master who had designs on the episcopal school or the episcopal philosophy. Its gentle, sunny flanks offered ideal situations for schools, and the students were breaking away more and more from the vicinity of the cloister and the subordination it expressed. A new town was rapidly forming at its foot, by the river, and on the northern slope; a picturesque confusion of schools, chapels, brothels, taverns, and hospices. It was the cradle of the famed Latin Quarter very Latin in those days, when the taverns swung out their Latin signs, taverna de grangia ad tur- botum, apud duos cygnos and so forth, and the songs that came from the latticed, vine-clothed arbours were half French, half Celtic-Latin. Abelard did not open...