 These international contacts helped integrate Scotland into a wider European scholarly world and were one of the most important ways in which the new ideas of humanism entered Scottish intellectual life.By 1497 the humanist and historian Hector Boece, who was born in Dundee and studied at Paris, returned to become the first principal at the new university of Aberdeen.The continued movement of scholars to other universities resulted in a school of Scottish nominalists at Paris by the early sixteenth century, the most important of whom was John Mair, generally described as a scholastic.