University of Cambridge

Damian Riehl Leader

Victor Morgan

Peter Searby

This is the first of a four volume 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 of the University 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 reorganized, 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.

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

Christopher Brooke

Christopher N. L. Brooke

This is the fourth volume of A History of the University of Cambridge and explores the extraordinary growth in size and academic stature of the University between 1870 and 1990. Though the University has made great advances since the 1870s, when it was viewed as a provincial seminary, it is also the home of tradition: a federation of colleges, one over 700 years old, one of the 1970s. This book seeks to penetrate the nature of the colleges and of the federation; and to show the way in which university faculties and departments have come to vie with the colleges for this predominant role. It attempts to unravel a fascinating institutional story of the society of the University and its place in the world. It explores in depth the themes of religion and learning, and of the entry of women into a once male environment. There are portraits of seminal and characteristic figures of the Cambridge scene, and there is a sketch - inevitably selective but wide-ranging - of many disciplines, an extensive study in intellectual and academic history.

Peter Searby

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