Over forty years ago, Winthrop S. Hudson published an attractive little book entitled The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (1980). This was a study of a group of Cambridge men known to contemporaries as the “Athenian tribe,” who in the 1540s succeeded the “Paduan humanists” (chief among them Sir Richard Morison and Thomas Starkey) as the leaders of English humanism, some of them taking up major positions of government under Edward VI and Elizabeth I. The Cambridge Connection in Tudor England: Humanism, Reform, Rhetoric, Politics is not intended to be a remake of Hudson's classic. Instead, co-editors John McDiarmid and Susan Wabuda offer a collection of specialized essays about the Cambridge connection and its members, based on the proceedings of a 2014 conference held at St John's College, Cambridge to mark the quincentenary of the birth of Sir John Cheke, the greatest of the Athenians. It is dedicated to the memory of McDiarmid, perhaps best known for his edited collection The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (2016).
The first of the book's three sections is centered on language and rhetoric. In chapter 1, McDiarmid explains that Cambridge humanists used the concepts of perfection and decline to interpret languages, political systems, and religion. Just as Greek and Latin had supposedly reached perfection in the ages of Demosthenes and Cicero before subsequently degenerating, so monarchy can degenerate into tyranny, and so the perfect primitive church had degenerated into popish superstition. Clearly humanists used the same intellectual framework to think about all areas of life; it is a fine observation that makes us wonder about the origins of this habit of thought (Aristotle?). Chapter 2, by Richard Simpson, is an excursive, fifty-one-page discussion of the well-known Cambridge Greek pronunciation controversy of the 1540s—a politically charged debate between the Athenians and conservative bishops, most notably the formidable scholar Stephen Gardiner. In chapter 3, Andrew W. Taylor offers a tightly packed analysis of Cheke's translation work from Greek to Latin, some of which he undertook to curry favor with Henry VIII.
The second section focuses on the Cambridge connection and the English Reformation, although chapter 4, by Wabuda, only partially fits under this heading. Wabuda pieces together an evocative biography of Agnes Cheke, the scholar's mother, who was a prosperous wine merchant in Cambridge; the story feels disconnected at times because it is necessarily built up from bits and pieces of evidence. In chapter 5, Lucy Rachel Nicholas lucidly analyzes Roger Ascham's Defence of the Lord's Supper (an edition of which she published in 2017), forcefully arguing that Cambridge shaped the course of national religious reform, and that Ascham was a committed Protestant. The stylishly written chapter 6, by M. Anne Overell, discusses the relationships between members of the Cambridge connection and Italian reformers living in England (including Bernadino Ochino and Pietro Martire Vermigli), a subject on which Overell has published two books.
The next six chapters examine the place of the Cambridge connection in Tudor society and government. In chapter 7, Alan Bryson examines the involvement of members of the Cambridge connection in social reform, noting that some of them recognized the true causes of soaring mid-Tudor inflation as population growth and currency debasement, while Protector Somerset and most Edwardians blamed the traditional evils of enclosure, purveyance, and regrating, as M. L. Bush observed in 1976. This was a classic case of policy makers applying outdated ideas to novel problems. In chapter 8, Cathy Shrank analyses Cheke's faintly ridiculous letters of admonition to his wife, who was probably some fifteen years his junior. There may be a contradiction in Shrank's portrayal of Mary Cheke as both a rebellious free spirit and a distressed victim of her husband's domineering behavior. In chapter 9, Norman Jones discusses the principles that may have underlain Cheke's recantation in 1556, and he explains how the scholar's former students went on to shape Elizabethan policy.
In chapter 10, Tracey A. Sowerby discusses the scholarly interests of Tudor ambassadors, particularly the Cambridge-educated Sir Thomas Chaloner. In chapter 11, Ceri Law turns attention to the continuing involvement of Athenians in university affairs after they had moved into government positions. In chapter 12, Glynn Parry discusses the occult studies of Cambridge men and other members of the elite, which were far more widespread than has been appreciated; as Parry points out, John Dee himself was a St. John's man, and William Cecil took celestial phenomena into account as matters of official concern. After the failure of a widely popularized prediction of cataclysmic change and the birth of “new worlds” in 1583, there was a conservative backlash against learned magic, which, as Parry intriguingly suggests, made “a considerable contribution to the disenchantment of the world” (323, 333).
Much of this book will be familiar territory to early modernists, although it is still worth reading for the new light it sometimes casts on an old theme. Between them, the contributors have mastered some very interesting and difficult sources, but some of them tend to impose this difficulty on the reader rather than guide them through the maze—unlike the original Cambridge Connection, which was clear and articulate throughout. To be fair, this is more a problem with current scholarship generally. In terms of presentation, I noticed some ungrammatical sentences, typos, stray speech marks, missing full stops, extra full stops, dashes instead of hyphens, and, in the introduction, a couple of one-sentence paragraphs that seem like vestiges of an earlier draft. On a final note, I think more use could have been made of Paul S. Needham's notable “Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and Court” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1971), which is cited by only one of the contributors.
