A History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 2, 1546-1750

Book excerpt: This volume brings to completion the four-volume A History of the University of Cambridge, and is a vital contribution to the history not only of one major university, but of the academic societies of early modern Europe in general. Its main author, Victor Morgan, has made a special study of the relations between Cambridge and its wider world: the court and church hierarchy which sought to control it in the aftermath of the Reformation; the 'country', that is the provincial gentry; and the wider academic world. Morgan also finds the seeds of contemporary problems of university governance in the struggles which led to and followed the new Elizabethan Statutes of 1570. Christopher Brooke, General Editor and part-author, has contributed chapters on architectural history and among other themes a study of the intellectual giants of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.