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Library Catalogues and Tudor Oxford and Cambridge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Mark H. Curtis
Mark H. Curtis*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

In the introduction to his valuable aid to research, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, Sears Jayne makes some helpful suggestions about how the evidence whose whereabouts he has discovered and revealed to us may enlarge our knowledge and improve our understanding of the English Renaissance. In one respect, however, he fails to do full justice to the potentialities of the sources he has opened up. For some reason, he permits an old myth about Tudor Oxford and Cambridge to color his opinion of what the lists of books contained in inventories of the personal effects of university students who died while they were in residence at Oxford and Cambridge prove about the character and intellectual life of the two institutions. He states categorically in one place that ‘the catalogues reflect beautifully the contrast between conservative, scholastic Oxford and reforming, humanist Cambridge’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 5 , 1958 , pp. 111 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1958

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References

1 Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956. Hereafter cited as Jayne, Library Catalogues.

2 Ibid., p. 51.

3 The fullest recent treatment of this thesis and the substantiating evidence for it can be found in Rowse, A. L., The England of Elizabeth: the Structure of Society (London, 1951), pp. 512–519 Google Scholar. Rowse's discussion is largely based on Bass Mullinger, J., The University of Cambridge, vol. II (Cambridge, 1884)Google Scholar. This is the real source of the myth in its modern form

4 Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573-1580, ed. by J. L. Scott (Westminster, 1874, Camden Society, new ser. XXXIII), p. 78.

5 Ibid., p. 79.

6 Jayne, , Library Catalogues, pp. 11–12 Google Scholar. When I was in Cambridge in the summer ot 1949, I made several unsuccessful attempts to get access to the library catalogues of Cambridge students. They were then still at Peterborough and my letters seeking permission to see them went unanswered.

7 Ibid., pp. 93-172.

8 Ibid., pp. 51-53.

9 The only change which I have made in the listings as they appear in the manuscript is to expand certain of the abbreviations which the appraisers used. I have supplied m or n when a horizontal stroke above a vowel indicated its omission and I have spelled out the breviographs used for com, per, pre, pro, and us.