Many apparent puerilities, such as the counting of letters and the marking of the middle point of books, had a practical use in enabling copyists of MSS.
Hence his work, written in French, contains a far greater amount of original matter; and his personal observations made in many countries, from England to Egypt, enabled him to avoid most of the puerilities which disfigure other works of his own or of a preceding age.
In this, a genuine work of the Renaissance, Cano endeavours to free dogmatic theology from the vain subtleties of the schools and, by clearing away the puerilities of the later scholastic theologians, to bring religion back to first principles; and, by giving rules, method, co-ordination and system, to build up a scientific treatment of theology.
What was even worse from an artistic point of view, they had contracted puerilities of style, vanities of rhetoric, stupidities of wearisome citation.
