william t. costello, sj - The School of Literature, Communication, and ...

PROLOGUE
In the year of our Lord, 1600, when Elizabeth I was reigning
and waning upon the throne of England, when Shakespeare was
mulling over Hamlet, and when Jacobean pessimism, at least according
to later weather analysts, was the forecast for the London
area and Southeast England (with light to moderate hopes of a
brave new world), the university at Cambridge snuggled comfort-
ably along the Cam as she had since the far-off days of Henry III.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Cambridge could
not have thought of herself as medieval, for everything she was
and taught was part and parcel of a way of thinking and living
that had been going on for centuries. By 1600, of course, the Reformation
was a fact in England, but the trouble between the London
Court and the Pope, while it had Cambridge theologians
fighting over new terminology and ancient doctrines, had de-
stroyed some of her very oldest foundations, and was keeping the
members of certain families from coming up to the University,
seemed not to disturb the philosophical and literary traditions
which lay outside the fields of dogma and canon law. Popular his-
torians, like Lytton Strachey, imply that the great change in English
thought occurred with the Reformation. 1 From our point of
view, the significance of Henry's break with Rome and the gradual
sundering of the Northern Island once again from Latin Europe
would become apparent at Cambridge only during the course of
the century just beginning in 1600.
The hundred years that span the gorge between the medieval
world of St. Thomas and the modern world of Newton richly re-
pay study from almost any point of view. Professor E. A. Burtt, for
example, in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical
Science (1925), Abraham Wolf in his A History of Science, Tech-
nology, and Philosophy in the i6th and ijth Centuries (1950),
and, more generally, Meyrick Carr in Phases of Thought in England
(1949) and Samuel L. Bethell in The Cultural Revolution of