The University of Oxford: A New History

by G. R. Evans

Overview

A generation or so ago, the Inklings - C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams - met regularly in an Oxford pub to encourage one another in the writing of fictions set in fantasy worlds... Philip Pullman's Gyptians live on an Oxford canal and it is from Oxford that his characters gain entry to another world... It is true that Oxford is a world to itself, a village where everyone stops in the Broad or the High to exchange local gossip... The visitor walking among the golden colleges may still see students setting off for examinations dressed in black and white... But encounters in the street are as likely to grapplings with politics (local, national and international) as exchanges about a point of scholarly detail... The 'reality' of Oxford is that it is not at all a land of faery.'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857730251
Publisher:	I.B.Tauris
Publication date:	04/30/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

G.R. Evans is Professor Emeritus of Medieval Theology and Intellectual History in the University of Cambridge, is a graduate of the University of Oxford and holds higher doctorates of both Oxford and Cambridge. She has written many well-received books in the fields of medieval and ecumenical theology, intellectual history and public policy in higher education and also serves as editor of the 'I.B.Tauris History of the Christian Church' series.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgements xi

Abbreviations xii

List of Illustrations xv

Introduction: coming to Oxford 1

1 Towards Oxford today 11

Not an Inkling of the future? 11

Riding out the First World War 18

Oxford takes the state's penny 22

Letting the women in: 1920 and after 27

Between the Wars 36

The Second World War and its aftermath 40

A Symposium at Worcester: the 1950s to the 1980s 48

From student protest to the battle for academic freedom 62

The 1990s and the beginning of another Oxford century 64

2 Oxford's Middle Ages 79

Oxford from the inside: inventing a University 79

Designing a syllabus 96

Housing the scholars 104

Quarrels and confrontations 110

3 Oxford and the interfering Tudors 121

Renaissance in Oxford 121

Reformation in Oxford 130

Consequences for the colleges 138

Another inspection: Edward VI goes 'visiting' 143

Mary Tudor's Visitors: the volte-face 150

Elizabeth places Oxford under the statutes of the realm 155

Teaching the Arts from the late sixteenth century 162

4 Oxford keeps up with the times 167

Oxford and the state 167

A society of scholars: student life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 188

Independent intellectuals and new styles of academic life 201

Teaching: the changing intellectual life of Oxford 206

Experiments in collegiate life and new ideas about universities 230

The Bodleian Library and the University Press 236

5 The nineteenth-century transformation 245

Varieties of student life at Oxford 245

The Oxford Movement 248

State interference and the threat of external 'reform' brings about major change 254

What became of the liberal arts? 262

Bringing the syllabus up to date: the Oxford reform of classical education 270

Oxford studies the sciences 278

Examinations reformed 291

Oxford does its bit for social mobility 298

Conclusion 309

Notes 313

Select bibliography 339

Index 349