Crowds of students flocked to the seats of learning, and, as travelling scholars, earned a precarious living by begging or "professing" medicine, assisting the illiterate for a small fee, or working wonders, such as casting horoscopes, or performing thaumaturgic tricks.

The professors of law were now the most influential members of the Imperial Council and of the various Imperial Courts.

In Central Europe, as elsewhere, notably in France, the civil lawyers were always on the side of the centralizing power, alike against the local jurisdictions and against the peasantry.
The effects of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the consequent dispersion of the accumulated Greek learning of the Byzantine Empire, had, by the end of the fifteenth century, begun to show themselves in a notable modification of European culture.

The circle of the seven sciences, the Quadrivium, and the Trivium, in other words, the mediaeval system of learning, began to be antiquated.
Scholastic philosophy, that is to say, the controversy of the Scotists and the Thomists, was now growing out of date.

Plato was extolled at the expense of Aristotle.