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

PROLOGUE 3
In general, however, Oxford seems to have left the scholastic world
behind more gradually than did Cambridge.
Although the story of seventeenth-century Cambridge is that of
scholasticism of its
flourishing, decline, and fall there has
been, except for Samuel Eliot Morison's brilliant chapters in The
Founding of Harvard College (1935), no specific study of scholasticism
at Cambridge. Explorations have been made, of course, into
the area. In addition to such contemporary critical estimates as
John
Hall's An Humble Motion . . .
(1649), John Webster's
Academiarum Examen (1654), Seth Ward's Vindiciae Academiarum
(1654) and Meric Casaubon's A Letter of Meric Casaubon
. . . to Peter du Moulin (1669), there is Thomas Fuller's The
History of the University of Cambridge, Since the Conquest (1655).
Fuller's account is invaluable, since he writes from within the
milieu, as anti-Aristotelian and sympathetic to the changes which
he recognizes as taking place about him.
In the nineteenth century, George Dyer wrote his engaging History
of the University and Colleges of Cambridge (1814), while
Thomas Baker collected an immense amount of pertinent material
in his meticulously copied MSS. Baker, preserved partly in the
University Library, Cambridge, and partly in the British Museum.
Building largely upon the Baker manuscripts, Charles Cooper in
his Annals of Cambridge (1842-53) put together a sourcebook,
which must remain the guide of stumbling steps. George Peacock,
in his Observations on the Statutes . . . of Cambridge (1841), has
documented his materials invaluably. Bishop Christopher Wordsworth's
works on eighteenth-century Cambridge include much
valuable seventeenth-century material.
Aside from recent histories of individual colleges, such as Master
George M. Trevelyan's Trinity College: An Historical Sketch
(1943) and A. L. Attwater's Pembroke College: A Short History
(1936), little attention has been paid seventeenth-century Cambridge
since J. B. Mullinger's Cambridge Characteristics in the
Seventeenth Century (1867). When it is realized that Mullinger's
little work was originally a prize undergraduate essay, his accom-
plishment is little short of astounding. The work, however, as
Mullinger himself realized in writing his three-volume History of
the University of Cambridge (1888), needed much revision and
supplementation. Writing without the advantage of the intense
medieval researches of the past seventy-five years, researches which
he himself enthusiastically furthered in later life, he tends in his
earlier work to look upon the Middle Ages as a cultural bell jar,