The movement back to the sources in Germany until the Thirty Years' War was a notable one. Collections were made by Simon Schard (1535-1573), Johannes Pistorius (1576-1608), Marquard Freher (1565-1614), Melchior Goldast (1576-1635) and others. After the war Leibnitz began a new epoch, both by his philosophy with its law of continuity in phenomena, and by his systematic attempt to collect sources through an association (1670). His plan to have documents printed as they were, instead of "correcting" them, was a notable advance. But from Leibnitz until the 19th century German national historiography made little progress,--although church historians like Mosheim and Neander stand out among the greatest historians of all time. France had not paralleled the activity of Maximilian's Renaissance historians. The father of modern French history, or at least of historical research, was Andre Duchesne (1584-1640), whose splendid collections of sources are still in use. Jean Bodin wrote the first treatise on scientific history (_Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem_, 1566), but he did not apply his own principles of criticism; and it was left for the Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St Maur to establish definitely the new science. The place of this school in the history of history is absolutely without a parallel. Few of those in the audiences of Moliere, returning home under the grey walls of St Germain-des-Pres, knew that within that monastery the men whose midnight they disturbed were laying the basis for all scientific history; and few of the later historians of that age have been any wiser. But when Luc d'Achery turned from exegetics to patristics and the lives of the saints, as a sort of Christian humanist, he led the way to that vast work of collection and comparison of texts which developed through Mabillon, Montfaucon, Ruinart, Martene, Bouquet and their associates, into the indispensable implements of modern historians. Here, as in the Reformation, controversy called out the richest product. Jean Mabillon's treatise, _De re diplomatica_ (1681), was due to the criticisms of that group of Belgian Jesuits whose _Acta Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur_ (1643, &c., see BOLLANDISTS) was destined to grow into the greatest repository of legend and biography the world has seen. In reply to D. Papebroch's criticisms of the chronicle of St Denis, Mabillon prepared this manual for the testing of medieval documents. Its canons are the basis, indeed, almost the whole, of the science of diplomatic (q.v.), the touchstone of truth for medieval research. Henceforth even the mediocre scholar had a body of technical rules by which to sort out the vast mass of apocrypha in medieval documentary sources. Scientific history depends upon implements. Without manuals, dictionaries, and easy access to texts, we should go as far astray as any medieval chronicler. The France of the Maurists supplied the most essential of these instruments.