This volume offers the general reader a synthesis of academic life in Paris during the first centuries of its existence. These early years were a period of excitement, discovery and intellectual freedom. Perhaps never again would a community of scholars engage in teaching and debate in such an astonishingly new and fresh world, with people, texts and ideas multiplying rapidly and surrounded by an equally rapidly developing city. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, it seems an enviable period, a time when optimism and eager research still went hand in hand with the idea that the whole of existence might be encompassed by the human mind.