Luther, in his old age, recalled with great gratitude the memory of his noble benefactress.[11] As a boy he had experienced but little of life’s pleasures and received small kindness from the world; but now life’s horizon brightened somewhat for the growing youth. Full of enthusiasm for the career mapped out for him by his father, that, namely, of the Law, he went in the summer of 1501 to the University of Erfurt. His parents’ financial circumstances had meanwhile somewhat improved as the result of his father’s industry in the mines at Mansfeld. The assiduous student was therefore no longer dependent on the help of strangers. According to some writers he took up his abode in St. George’s Hostel.[12] He was entered in the Matriculation Register of the Erfurt High School as “Martinus Ludher ex Mansfelt,” and for some considerable time after he continued to spell his family name as Luder, a form which is also to be found up to the beginning of the seventeenth century in the case of others (Lüder, Luider, Leuder). From 1512 he began, however, to sign himself “Lutherus” or “Luther.”[13] The lectures on philosophy, understood in the widest sense of the term, which he first attended were delivered at the University of Erfurt by comparatively capable teachers, some of whom belonged to the Augustinian Order. The Catholic spirit of the Middle Ages still permeated the teaching and the whole life of the little republic of learning. As yet, learning was still cast in the mould of the traditional scholastic method, and the men, equally devoted to the Church and to their profession, who were Luther’s principal teachers, Jodocus Trutfetter of Eisenach and Bartholomew Arnoldi of Usingen,[14] later an Augustinian, were well versed in the scholastic spirit of the day. Alongside the traditional teaching of the schools there already existed in Erfurt and the neighbourhood another, viz. that of the Humanists, or so-called poets, which, though largely at variance with Scholasticism, was cultivated by many of the best minds of the day. Luther, with his vivacity of thought and feeling, could not long remain a stranger to them. With their spiritual head Mutianus at Gotha, close by, they formed one of the more prominent groups of German Humanists, although, so far, they had not produced any work of great consequence. The contrast between Humanism and Scholasticism, which was to come out so strongly at a later period, was as yet hardly noticeable in the Erfurt schools. Crotus Rubeanus, at that time a University friend of Luther’s, became at a later date, however, the principal author of the “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum,” a clever and biting libel on monks and Scholastics, written from a Humanist standpoint. Crotus boasted subsequently of his intimate intercourse (“_summa familiaritas_”) with Luther.[15]