Inky Fingers by Anthony Grafton

Author:Anthony Grafton
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Harvard University Press

THE UNIVERSITIES AT WAR

De antiquitate sprang from a strange but recognizable form of academic politics.14 Queen Elizabeth loved pageantry, which both universities provided in lavish style. In 1564, a Cambridge orator informed her that his university was much older than the other place. But in 1566 the queen graced Oxford with her presence. By a strange chance, John Caius’s namesake, Thomas Caius, a fellow and warden of All Souls College and Register of the University of Oxford, composed an “Assertion of the Antiquity of Academy of Oxford,” which he presented to her majesty.

Thomas Caius had not meant his work for general circulation. But Elizabeth’s court was a hive of information masters, above all William Cecil. Cecil was a Cambridge man and a friend and ally of Matthew Parker, another Cambridge man and Caius’s closest friend. Networks buzzed, messages flew. As the antiquary John Strype told the story in the early eighteenth century, “This MS. as it seems by the Secretaries means, a Cambridge man, coming into the hands of the Archbishop, a Cambridge Man also, was transcribed, and communicated by him unto another Caius, and a learned Antiquarian of Cambridge; the Archbishop exhorting him to consider well the Book, and to vindicate his University.”15 One of the copies that came into circulation remains in the Parker Library.16 John Caius was one of many early modern medical men who did systematic historical research, as Nancy Siraisi has shown.17 But this was a special case: Caius the historian was taking part in a wider confrontation, one university against the other, when he sent his little book to be printed in London together with the work by the other Caius, which was prefaced by a short imaginary history of Oxford taken from the Oxford proctors’ book. It was the pedant’s version of the Boat Race. Caius put up a feeble pretense of impartiality by calling himself “the Londoner,” but he soon admitted that everyone had seen through it. Not many seem to have taken John Caius’s side. The antiquary William Lambarde was a trusted friend and assistant of Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury and Caius’s close friend. Yet all he found to say was that he left the points at issue “to Doctour Caius of Cambridge and Maister Key of Oxforde to be disputed, and to indifferent readers to be adiudged.”18

The controversy went on for another fifty years. Generations of scholars expended energy worthy of a better cause on the quintessential learned activity of belaboring one another with slapsticks and bladders. The arguments involved were relatively simple. Oxford was clearly the older of the two universities. The city, after all, had been founded by Good King Mempricius, only a century after Brutus the Trojan first came to Britain. It was known as “Beaumont” due to its handsome setting. Later on, the Greek scholars who had accompanied Brutus to England and settled in Cricklade (Greeklade) migrated to Beaumont. This move took place not long before the Saxons settled in England. Their King Alfred

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