234 History of Universities
Regarding the Renaissance as a state of mind rather than
an era, the University of Florence, founded in 1349, the very
year of the great plague so vividly described in Boccaccio’s
Decameron, was the first Renaissance university. It was
started off with eighteen professorial chairs, including the
one that Boccaccio himself occupied, on the study of Dante.
To the fourteenth century succeeded the century of human-
ism, when Hellenic culture was recovered; and scholars both
inside the universities and out, began to study, edit, and print
classical texts. Many of the free-lance Italian humanists were
frankly pagan in their attitude, but the university scholars
took up the study of Greek as a key to the better understand-
ing of the New Testament; and beside Greek they placed
Hebrew, with its allied languages, Arabic, Syriac, and Ara-
maic, as the key to the Old Testament. At the University of
Louvain, in the fifteenth century, there was established the
first of the famous trilingual colleges of the Renaissance,
devoted to the scientific study of the three sacred tongues—
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—without which (so wrote one of
its earliest professors, Erasmus of Rotterdam) there can be
no true religion, and no sound learning. Critical scholarship,
we are too apt to forget, was applied to the Bible before the
Protestant Reformation; the first of the great Polyglot
Bibles was issued from the trilingual college at Cardinal
Ximenes’ University of Alcala in 1517, the very year that
Martin Luther nailed up his ninety-five theses. And the
Collège de France was founded by the Catholic and human-
ist king Francis I in 1531, with two chairs of Greek, three
of Hebrew, and one of Mathematics.
The first influence of the Renaissance on the universities
then, was the introduction of Greek and Hebrew into the
curriculum (not for undergraduates, to be sure, but for
graduate students), the study of Greek and Hebrew philoso-