om Valladolid in Spain to Cracow in distant Poland and from
Poitiers in France to Rostock in Germany.

It is quite true that much of the teaching done by these early
professors would sound absurd to our ears, trained to listen to
logarithms and geometrical theorems. The point however, which I want to
make is this--the Middle Ages and especially the thirteenth century
were not a time when the world stood entirely still. Among the younger
generation, there was life, there was enthusiasm, and there was a
restless if somewhat bashful asking of questions. And out of this
turmoil grew the Renaissance.

But just before the curtain went down upon the last scene of the
Mediaeval world, a solitary figure crossed the stage, of whom you ought
to know more than his mere name. This man was called Dante. He was the
son of a Florentine lawyer who belonged to the Alighieri family and he
saw the light of day in the year 1265. He grew up in the city of his
ancestors while Giotto was painting his stories of the life of St.
Francis of Assisi upon the walls of the Church of the Holy Cross, but
often when he went to school, his frightened eyes would see the puddles
of blood which told of the terrible and endless warfare that raged
forever between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the followers of the
Pope and the adherents of the Emperors.

When he grew up, he became a Guelph, because his father had been
one before him, just as an American boy might become a Democrat or a
Republican, simply because his father had happened to be a Democrat or
a Republican. But after a few years, Dante saw that Italy, unless united
under a single head, threatened to perish as a victim of the disordered
jealousies of a thousand little cities. Then he became a Ghilbeiline.

He looked for help beyond the Alps. He hoped that a mighty emperor
might come and re-establish unity and order. Alas! he hoped in vain. The
Ghibellines were driven out of Florence in the year 1802. From that time
on until the day of his death amidst the dreary ruins of Ravenna, in the
year 1321, Dante was a homeless wanderer, eating the bread of charity at
the table of rich patrons whose names would have sunk into the deepest
pit of oblivion but for this single fact, that they had been kind to a
poet in his misery. During the many years of exile, Dante felt compelled
to justify himself and his actions when he had been a political leader
in his home-town, and when he had spent his days walkin