Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T20:39:22.291Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Conservatism and Catholicism in Elizabethan Cambridge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2018

Get access

Summary

Historians agree that Elizabethan Cambridge had a continuing problem with religious nonconformity. Patrick Collinson called the 1570s ‘a time of exceptional turbulence’ in the university; Christopher Brooke suggests that it was a time of ‘doctrinal strife’, with religious orthodoxy under attack from both ‘the advocates of presbytery and the advocates of Rome’. One of these two threats has received by far the greatest amount of attention. There are clear and obvious reasons for this. The central place of the university in the genesis of Elizabethan Protestant radicalism is not in doubt, and, as Collinson puts it, young Cambridge Fellows and students provided the ‘rank and file’ of the nascent movement. There is no need to abandon the notion that the University of Cambridge and the Elizabethan ‘godly’ had a special, if frequently strained, relationship.

Yet this is an association that can be pressed too far. There are two particular dangers. The first is that later developments are allowed to distort understanding of the first decades of Elizabeth's reign. Debora Shuger has argued that ‘The Calvinist dominance at Cambridge was real. It was also, however, confined to a single decade’: the 1590s. The conflicts of this later period had their own dynamics, shaped by hardened confessional identities and attitudes to ‘popery’ altered forever by the arrival of the twin threats of Jesuits and attempted Spanish invasion. They cannot easily be taken as reflective of the same institution ten or twenty years earlier. The second danger lies in conflating the importance of Cambridge to the godly with the importance of the godly within Cambridge. The undoubted volume, eminence and persistence of Puritan voices in Cambridge does not necessarily demonstrate that radical – or even moderate – Protestantism dominated the university to the exclusion of all else.

This chapter begins from this premise and, in a discussion centring on four case studies, examines the continuing presence of conservatives and Catholics within the university. This discussion needs some caveats, not least on those terms themselves. One of the greatest transformations in the historiography of early modern Catholicism over the past few decades has been the recognition that the lines around the term ‘Catholic’ have often been drawn too sharply for this period, masking the many shades of grey between full conformity and total defiance in the face of the demands of the Elizabethan state.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×