he appropriately called "The Awakener." With a loud flourish of trumpets, he described himself as:
a doctor in perfected theology; a professor of pure and
blameless wisdom; a philosopher known, approved, and
honorifically acknowledged by the foremost academies of
Europe; to none a stranger except to the barbarians and
the vulgar; a waker of slumbering souls; a breaker of
presumptuous and stubborn ignorance.
Both to the Sorbonne in Paris and the Wittenberg
University he addressed himself in much more dignified
and modest language. He evidently did not take
Oxford very seriously, and indeed there was very little
intellectual life in that University, which was
under the rule of the Queen's favorite, Lord Leicester.
The professors were court nominees, and Bruno
describes them as "men arrayed in long robes of velvet,
with hands most precious for the multitude of
costly rings on their fingers, golden chains about their
necks, and with manners as void of courtesy as cowherds."
He also thought they knew a good deal more
of beer than of Greek. The students were very young,
ignorant, and boorish, occupied in drinking, dueling,
and toasting in ale-houses and country inns. However,
he had a very high opinion of the University as
a whole, and consented to deliver a series of lectures
and also held a public disputation before the Chancellor
and an illustrious foreign visitor. He appears
to have aroused the pedagogues to fury, and, by his
