Their influence spread as far as Italy and England whence students came to them. Among the medieval rhetorical treatises which have come down to us under the title of "Ars" or "Summa Dictaminis" four, at least, were written or re-edited by Orléans professors.
In 1230, when for a time the doctors of the University of Paris were scattered, a number of the teachers and disciples took refuge in Orleans; when pope Boniface VIII, in 1298, promulgated the sixth book of the Decretals, he appointed the doctors of Bologna and the doctors of Orléans to comment upon it.
St. Yves (1253-1303) studied civil law at Orléans, and Clement V also studied there law and letters; by a Bull published at Lyons, 27 January, 1306.
He endowed the Orléans institutes with the title and privileges of a University (it has been founded as one of the very earliest universities outside taly in 1235, only two years after Cambridge and Toulouse, in France only Paris's Sorbonne was even older).
Twelve later popes granted the new university many privileges. In the fourteenth century it had as many as five thousand students from France, Germany, Lorraine, Burgundy, Champagne, Picardy, Normandy, Touraine, Guyan, Scotland.
Among those who studied or lectured there are quoted: in the fourteenth century, Cardinal Pierre Bertrandi; in the fifteenth, John Reuchlin; in the sixteenth, religious reformer Calvin and Théodore de Bèze, the Protestant Anne Dubourg, the publicist François Hotmann, the jurisconsult Pierre de l'Etoile; in the seventeenth, Molière (perhaps in 1640), and the savant lexicographer Du Cange; in the eighteenth, the jurisconsult Pothier.
