History of the English People, Volume III: The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540Green, John Richard
History
History of the English People, Volume III: The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540
Green, John Richard
Great Britain -- History
But the "armed Greeks" of More's apologue found a yet wider field in the
reform of the higher education of the country. On the Universities the
influence of the New Learning was like a passing from death to life.
Erasmus gives us a picture of what happened in 1516 at Cambridge where he
was himself for a time a teacher of Greek. "Scarcely thirty years ago
nothing was taught here but the _Parva Logicalia_, Alexander, those
antiquated exercises from Aristotle, and the _Quaestiones_ of Scotus. As
time went on better studies were added, mathematics, a new, or at any rate
a renovated, Aristotle, and a knowledge of Greek literature. What has been
the result? The University is now so flourishing that it can compete with
the best universities of the age." William Latimer and Croke returned from
Italy and carried on the work of Erasmus at Cambridge, where Fisher,
Bishop of Rochester, himself one of the foremost scholars of the new
movement, lent it his powerful support. At Oxford the Revival met with a
fiercer opposition. The contest took the form of boyish frays, in which
the youthful partizans and opponents of the New Learning took sides as
Greeks and Trojans. The young king himself had to summon one of its
fiercest enemies to Woodstock, and to impose silence on the tirades which
were delivered from the University pulpit. The preacher alleged that he
was carried away by the Spirit. "Yes," retorted the king, "by the spirit,
not of wisdom, but of folly." But even at Oxford the contest was soon at
an end. Fox, Bishop of Winchester, established the first Greek lecture
there in his new college of Corpus Christi, and a Professorship of Greek
was at a later time established by the Crown. "The students," wrote an
eye-witness in 1520, "rush to Greek letters, they endure watching,
fasting, toil, and hunger in the pursuit of them." The work was crowned at
last by the munificent foundation of Cardinal College, to share in whose
teaching Wolsey invited the most eminent of the living scholars of Europe,
and for whose library he promised to obtain copies of all the manuscripts
in the Vatican.
[Sidenote: Church Reform]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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