A History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 1, The University to 1546

This is the first volume of a four-part History of the University of Cambridge, under the general editorship of Professor C. N. L. Brooke.

Damian Riehl Leader (Author)

9780521328821, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 March 1989

424 pages
23.4 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.824 kg

"...a badly needed synthesis of important recent research. Damian Leader's book is especially valuable because it avoids the two besetting sins of most university histories. First, it eschews the parochial, self-congratulatory tone of most such works: it is written not for the 'old boys' who want only to glorify Alma Mater, but for the serious historical student who is trying to fit the universities into the intellectual, social, religious, political, and economic history of the period. Second, while it does study institutional structures, it also faces the fact, often forgotten in histories of universities, that education, perhaps even thinking, was going on within those structures. What makes this history especially valuable is that it studies the universities as teaching bodies closely tied to the general development of society." Charles G. Nauert, Jr., The Sixteenth Century Journal

This is the first volume of a four-part History of the University of Cambridge, under the general editorship of Professor C. N. L. Brooke, and the first volume on the medieval university as a whole to be published in over a century. It provides a synthesis of the intellectual, social, political and religious life of the early university, and gives serious attention to the development of classroom studies and how they changed with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Following the first stirrings in the early thirteenth century, the evolution of the university is traced from the original corporation of masters and scholars through the early development of the colleges. The second half of the book focuses on the century from the 1440s to the 1540s, which saw the flowering of the university under Tudor patronage. In the decades preceding the Reformation many colleges were founded, the teaching structures reorganised and the curriculum made more humanistic. The place of Cambridge at the forefront of northern European universities was eventually assured when Henry VIII founded Trinity College in 1546, in the face of changes and difficulties experienced during the course of the Reformation.

List of illustrations
General editor's preface
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Origins
2. Hostels, convents and colleges
3. Teaching
4. The trivium
5. The quadrivium
6. The philosophies
7. Theology
8. Law
9. Medicine
10. Interlude and expansion
11. Internal reform
12. John Fisher and Lady Margaret
13. The Henrician Reformation
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], British & Irish history [HBJD1]