Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/169

UNIVERSITIES AND OTHER CENTRES OF LEARNING 157 von Helfenstein, Jacob Spiegel, Jacob Villinger, Jacob Bannisis, George Neudecker, and others, were praised by the Humanists as sound scholars and leaders of the new scientific movement ; they did all in their power to encourage science and the study of it. Maximilian's chancellor and adviser, Matthias Lang, who was after- wards bishop of Gurk and archbishop of Salzburg, was held in the highest estimation. The Imperial Court was the centre of the highest culture, and the University of Vienna, ' the Emperor's pet child,' took the lead among all the German seats of learning. The Universities . . . Conrad Celtes. The University of Vienna had already in the reign of Frederick III. gained a world-wide renown through its great mathematicians and astronomers, Johann von Gmunden, George Peuerbach, and Johann Miiller (surnamed Eegiomontanus). In no other university were mathematics and astronomy taught by such excellent masters and with such brilliant results; Peuerbach and Eegiomontanus, by their lectures on the Latin poets and prose writers, were the first to give an impetus to Humanistic studies. Bernhard Perger introduced a better method of teaching Latin, and with this object in view composed a guide to the Latin language founded on the grammar of the Archbishop Nicholaus von Siponto, of which eighteen editions are known to have appeared up to the year 1500. After the year 1457 the study of the Greek authors, including the most difficult of them, 1 was introduced at Vienna. 1 A proof of the incorrectness of the assertion that Reuchlin, who was born in 1455, was the first to teach Greek literature in Germany.