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Boutcher, Warren
2002.
Reassessing Tudor Humanism.
p.
243.
Article contents
The Social Relations of Tudor Oxford
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
Extract
If study of the university can have any place in the general history of society, it must be understood as a part of a much larger historical phenomenon, of whose vastness and complexity the university's records themselves make us aware. In the sixteenth century we are conscious of powerful currents of social change and energy upon which the universities floated with little or no power of control: a rapidly growing population, geographically and economically on the move; a burgeoning school system; urban wealth growing and changing location, but always under the massive dominance of London; an active land-market; rise in prices; and the work of governments, both national and local, concerned with education and its consequences. This is the setting of Tudor society, and only special optical devices will enable us to pick out the university and set it in the foreground. In the process some distortion is inevitable. An indication of the problems that occur in university history may be found in the view of a recent student of Tudor Cambridge who, while acknowledging that one contribution of the universities to the complex change within English society was ‘the creation of a more refined and integrated cultural and intellectual milieu’ centred upon London and the court, finds the truly significant contribution in a more informed, vigorous and tenacious local solidarity in the ‘country’. Another historian of Elizabethan England tells us that in the universities, ‘the interesting thing, as so often in English life, is the extent and intimacy of the social mixture’.
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References
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