However, at age 17, the age of some of you in the audience this morning, he fled the monastery and became a vagrant student, moving from one university to another in search of humanistic learning, first in Germany, then in Italy. He had greater difficulties in finding the right place than you have had in settling on Stanford. Hutten's earliest claim to fame is his role in a celebrated controversy concerning the preservation of Hebrew literature against efforts to have the emperor order the collection and destruction of all Jewish books. Hutten and a friend employed the weapon of satire in defense of Reuchlin and against the scholastic enemies of learning and scholarship. Its serious aspects aside, the Reuchlin affair also was exhilarating for the young scholars.
Studies blossom and the minds move.
In the third of the Invectives he admonished his own and Luther's enemies among the clergy with the words videtis illam spirare libertatis auram. Stanford's motto is the abbreviated affirmative statement Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Clearly, freedom from as yet unreformed Church orthodoxy, freedom from the Inquisition, freedom from Rome's worldly aspects. But freedom was also intellectual freedom, the freedom to engage in fearless inquiry and the freedom to speak your mind robustly and without inhibition. Hutten certainly used robust and even harsh language.