Dante, moved perhaps by some pleasant memory of the past, pays the old scholastic street the tribute of a verse. The elegant Petrarca mentions it frequently in his Latin writings, and always with a sneer. He remembers only “the disputatious city of Paris, and the noisy Street of Straw”; or “the plaudits of the Petit Pont and the Rue du Fouarre, the most famous places on earth.”

Rabelais speaks of it as the place where Pantagruel first held disputes with the learned doctors, “having posted up his nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-four theses in all the carrefours of the city”; and Ruskin, Modern Painters , III 85, justifies the mention of it in Paradise as follows:⁠—