CULTURES OF LEARNING IN ENGLAND C. 1450-1660
ST CATHARINE’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
10 JULY 2004
Last summer Dr Sarah Knight and Dr Daniel Wakelin, then respectively
research fellow in the AHRB Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and
Court Cultures at the University of Warwick, and research fellow of St
Catharine’s College Cambridge, organized a colloquium that took place in
Cambridge on Saturday 10 July 2004. About twenty-five participants attended,
coming from the University of Cambridge; the University of Warwick; Anglia
Polytechnic University, Cambridge; the Warburg Institute, London; the
University of Oxford; the University of St Andrews; the University of
Helsinki; and Arizona State University.
The theme was the place of learning and education in English culture
between the late Middle Ages and the Stuart period. In the opening paper Dr
David Rundle asked how genuine or otherwise were claims to learning by
aristocratic patrons – and, from some early Tudor evidence, concluded that
they were quite doubtful! Then there were several papers on humanism as a
central component in the intellectual life of that age: Dr Andrew Taylor
discussed the sweet and decorous tone of some defenders of humanist studies
in Cambridge in the 1520s; Dr Kenneth Austin discussed the use of humanist
letters to bind English and continental religious reformers. Other papers
concerned educational life in more general terms. In a very witty paper Dr
Felicity Henderson revealed the preoccupations of scholars at the University
of Cambridge in the 1600s, reading excerpts from the Latin verses in which
they praised their friends and colleges and described their everyday concerns.
Fred Schurink described the teaching of reading in Elizabethan grammar
schools and suggested how it might allow us some insight into the wider
literary culture of that period.
The colloquium included several papers on particular branches of
learning. In a bold and panoramic paper, Daniel Andersson discussed the
study of logic and related philosophical disciplines in late Elizabethan
England, considering as a case study Richard Stanihurst’s Harmonia, published
in 1569. Jason Rampelt examined John Wallis’s career as Savilian Professor of
Geometry in Oxford, concentrating particularly on the lectures Wallis
delivered on Euclid’s Elements between 1651 and 1656, relating these lectures
to the contemporary university milieu and to contemporary developments in
the study of mathematics. The day closed with two papers treating particular
subjects in a wider European perspective. Adolpho Giuliani considered the
study of casuistry and related this discipline to aspects of Aristotelianism and
theories of conscience. Angus Vine considered early modern antiquarianism,
relating it to poetic composition, antiquities and excavated material remains,
with particular reference to Pierre De Brach’s Hymne de Bourdeaux and Thomas
Churchyard’s The Worthines of Wales (1587). The day included nine papers, a
picnic lunch by the river and supper in a restaurant nearby: a congenial as well
as a scholarly occasion.
Dr Sarah Knight (University of Leicester)
Dr Daniel Wakelin (Christ’s College, Cambridge)