The Tudors and Europe by Matusiak John

Author:Matusiak, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

For a scholar of Fisher’s uncompromising rigour and hard-edged honesty, of course, the characteristically blunt reflection on Cambridge’s recent past was hardly surprising. But he was not alone in bemoaning his university’s previous shortcomings, and in a letter of 1516 to his old pupil Henry Bullock of Queens’ College, Erasmus himself commented that ‘about thirty years ago, nothing was taught at Cambridge but Alexander [de Villa Dei], the Parva Logicalia, as they are called, those old dictates of Aristotle, and the questions from Scotus’.

By contrast, Oxford had for some time boasted a closer connection with developments abroad, and assembled a more glittering array of scholars immersed in the intellectual ethos of the Italian Renaissance. William Grocyn, reader in divinity at Magdalen from 1481 to 1488, had, for example, studied at Florence under Demetrius Chalcondylas and Politian, before returning to Oxford to deliver what is likely to have been the first ever set of lectures on the Greek language delivered there. Thomas Linacre too, that other great champion of English humanism, who was also at Oxford between 1480 and 1485, had graduated in medicine from the University of Padua, and thereafter spent some further time in Italy as a member of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s ‘academy’ before returning to his homeland. There he eventually taught Thomas More and gave Erasmus his grounding in Greek. Taking the whole Italian world – including Rome, Venice, Bologna and Vicenza – within his sphere of interest, he would become physician to Henry VIII and founder of the Royal College of Physicians, while John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, was another who had returned from study in Italy in 1496, bringing with him a new style of scriptural exegesis, applying the principles of Renaissance classical scholarship to biblical texts. Even the occasional nobleman, indeed, like William Blount, 4th Baron Mountjoy, who was appointed ‘companion of studies’ to the future Henry VIII in 1499 for the purpose of reading history with him and improving his Latin composition, felt the influence of these figures. For in addition to befriending Grocyn and Colet, he had been accompanied by his chaplain and Richard Whitford, a fellow of Queens’ College, to complete his formal studies in Paris, after which Erasmus became one of his tutors.

Instrumental to the exposure of Oxford to new influences had been the administrator, diplomat and scholar, Bishop Richard Foxe, who was not only a great sponsor of humanist studies within the university, but the founder in 1517 of Corpus Christi College. Within the preamble of the college’s founding statutes, he had made clear his views on the function of learning:

We have no abiding city here, as saith the Apostle, but we seek one to come in heaven at which we hope to arrive with greater ease and dispatch if while we travel in this life, wretched and death-doomed as it is, we rear a ladder whereby we may gain a readier ascent. We give the name of virtue to the right side of the ladder, and that of

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