Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe LibrarySmith, Goldwin
History
Oxford and Her Colleges: A View from the Radcliffe Library
Smith, Goldwin
University of Oxford
enlightened Bishop the dissolution of the Monasteries seemed inevitable.
The statutes of Foxe's College are written in a style which affects the
highest classical elegance. They elaborate throughout the metaphor of a
bee-hive with its industrious insects and its store of intellectual
honey. They embody the hopes of the Renaissance and depict a College of
the Humanities. There is to be a Reader in Greek, and for the subjects
of his lectures a long list of great Greek authors is assigned. There is
to be a Reader of Latin, for whose lectures a similar list of Latin
authors is given, and who is to keep "barbarism," that mortal sin in
the eyes of a devotee of the Renaissance, out of the hive. Theology is
not forgotten. The Founder pays a due, possibly somewhat conventional,
tribute to its surpassing importance. Of this, also, there is a
Professor, but its guides in interpreting Scripture are not to be the
mediæval textbooks, such as Aquinas and the Master of the Sentences, but
the Greek and Latin Fathers, including the daring Origen and Augustine
the favourite of Luther. The Readers are to lecture not to the College
only, but to the University at large, a new provision, connecting the
College with the University, which hardly took effect till very recent
times. One of the first Readers was the learned Spaniard, Juan Luis
Vives, whose appointment bespoke the cosmopolitan character of the
humanist republic of letters. The statutes were signed by the Founder
with a trembling hand eight months before his death, so that only in
imagination did he see his literary bees at work.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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