Jill Pellew and Lawrence Goldman (eds), Dethroning Historical Reputations, Universities, Museums and the Commemoration of Benefactors (Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study: London, University of London, 2018). ISBN: 9781909646827 (Open-access e-book available at: http://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/pellewgoldman

This chapter studies Dethroning Historical Reputations, Universities, Museums and the Commemoration of Benefactors (2018), edited by Jill Pellew and Lawrence Goldman. In this very appealing publication, twelve contributors offer pithy remarks on what David Cannadine calls ‘institutionalized ancestor worship’, the occasions specifically reserved for those worthy individuals who lavish gifts and endowments on universities. For centuries, universities or museums and art galleries happily accepted donations with no questions asked. So have the trustees of other kinds of institutions, or religious leaders. The sale of indulgences in the middle ages to protect the souls of sinners carried on until reformers were alarmed by their misuse. Whereas in more recent times eyebrows might occasionally be raised concerning the source of a generous benefaction, or the views of the donor on a range of dicey matters, ways were found to smooth over any improprieties. The remarks by contributors overlap as they should, since the publication is the outcome of a conference held in the spring of 2017. The spirit of the Cambridge University historian Herbert Butterfield hovers over the sessions. His discussion of whiggish history-making is always relevant and always worth revisiting.

Brevity is the Soul of Wit or Something Else

This chapter looks at two works by accomplished and informed scholars. The first book, Universities and Colleges: A Very Short Introduction (2017), is by David Palfreyman and Paul Temple. The second, The Origins of Higher Learning, Knowledge Networks and the Early Development of Universities (2017), is by Roy Lowe and Yoshihito Yasuhara. The Origins of Higher Learning is an account of what may be termed a run-up to the institutionalization of higher learning that occurred in what Charles Homer Haskins called The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), the century in which the university as yet inchoate, is to be found. Meanwhile, Palfreyman and Temple essentially concentrate on the transformation in mission, organisation, and ‘stakeholders’ in the nineteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the provision for ‘higher education’ or ‘tertiary education’ in the United Kingdom (mainly England) and the United States.

‘To Promote Religion and Learning and Piety’: The Failure of Queens College, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, Revisited

This chapter details how, in the early 1760s, Hampshire magnates promoted a bold new educational project to found a college in Hampshire County. However, it was the clergy of northern Hampshire County who took the first formal steps to secure a college even though their initial efforts and ongoing support have been overshadowed in subsequent accounts by Israel Williams' ubiquitous presence. The ambition to establish a western counterpart to Harvard probably had been germinating for some time in the Williams family, and the leader in this new clerical enterprise was evidently the Rev. Jonathan Ashley of Deerfield, who certainly belonged to the Williams connection. These Hampshire clergy, particularly the leaders such as Ashley, were conservative, Stoddardian ‘Old Light’ Calvinists who, like Israel Williams and other lay persons, had supported the ouster of Jonathan Edwards from his Northampton pulpit in 1750 and who, in Kevin Sweeney's words, ‘found Harvard too liberal and Yale too susceptible to the New Divinity’. Queens College was conceived as the institutional expression of this distinctive and highly-conservative regional society within the Bay Province.

Alard Palenc: Bachelor of Theology and Socius of the Collège de Sorbonne

This chapter discusses how Alard Palenc played an especially active role in the affairs of both the University of Paris and the Collège de Sorbonne between 1430 and his unexpected and unexplained death in August of 1433. From its earliest years, the Collège de Sorbonne was governed by a provisor and its day-to-day life managed by the assembly of the socii, each of whom could be chosen early in his career to exercise the important functions of prior and procurator. The prior's responsibilities included arranging house assignments, maintaining house discipline, presiding at the assemblies, and recording the assembly's minutes. The magnus procurator, assisted by two parvi procuratores, took care of the fiscal management of the house and its material wealth. While the care of the books was one of the procurator's original duties, the task passed to an annually elected librarian. Palenc would hold three of these appointments during his years at the Sorbonne: prior, procurator, and librarian. He was also a cleric of the diocese of Tournai, a member and proctor of the Picard Nation, and a lecturer in theology and ethics.

Claire Angotti, Gilbert Fournier, and Donatella Nebbiai (eds.), Les livres des maîtres de Sorbonne: histoire et rayonnement du collège et de ses bibliothèques du XIIIe siècle à la Renaissance (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017). ISBN 978-2-85944-993-3.

This chapter discusses Les livres des maîtres de Sorbonne (2017) by Claire Angotti, Gilbert Fournier, and Donatella Nebbiai. This volume presents nine studies dedicated to the medieval Collège de Sorbonne of the University of Paris, to its famous and well-documented library, and to the development and use of the library's collections, vis-à-vis both subject matter and reader. All authors are experts in their respective fields, and bring to the subject matter a wealth of information and insight. Two of the studies situate the college in the context of the university and its library in the context of the libraries of Paris' other secular colleges. Meanwhile, material found in the Sorbonne's collection became the focus of two articles: commentaries on the Nicomachian Ethics and vernacular texts available for use in the library. The volume concludes with two instruments de travail useful for those studying the history of the book and the history of library: a lengthy, detailed, codicological guide to the library's manuscripts and an exhaustive annotated bibliography dealing with studies of the Sorbonne Library published between 1838 and 2017.

Universities Scottish, Irish, and European: Lyon Playfair (1818–98) and University Reform

This chapter assesses Lyon Playfair's views on universities. Playfair was a Scottish scientist who became an administrator, a university professor, and a politician. He has been praised as ‘one of the chief architects of the system of technical education in Great Britain as it exists to-day’. As a Member of Parliament (MP), he had to engage with practical university problems, in England and Ireland as well as Scotland, as they arose on the political agenda. But his starting-point was Scotland, and in putting Scottish problems in a wider British and European context, Playfair was part of a distinctive nineteenth-century discourse. Scottish academics and intellectuals were stimulated to think in comparative terms by the obvious contrast between Scottish and English universities; by the need to adapt university education to new social needs; by discussions which surrounded major legislation in 1858 and 1889; and by the widely shared feeling that Scotland had a national system of education closer to continental than to English traditions.

‘Christ’s College and the Latitude-Men’ Revisited: A Seminary of Heretics?

This chapter examines the notorious quarrel between Ralph Widdrington and Ralph Cudworth concerning the mastership of Christ's College. This prosopographical study of the fellowship at Christ's College between 1644 and 1669 yields two conclusions. First, Widdrington's opposition required that Cudworth be ever vigilant as master of the college, especially during the Restoration of the Monarchy. Perhaps without Widdrington's sour and vindictive temper and personal ambition there would have been less urgency in Henry More's and Cudworth's formation and consolidation of a congenial fellowship, but it was necessary to create an environment in which the Platonist philosophers and their pupils could work freely. More and Cudworth, as close friends and philosophical allies, formed the nucleus of a community with a particular intellectual character. This leads to the second and much more important conclusion: all of that effort was necessary because there was definitely something going on intellectually in the college which had to be defended. Widdrington and his high church allies took umbrage at what the ‘latitude-men’ were thinking, saying, and writing at the ‘seminary of Heretics’. The chapter then looks at the circle of Christian Platonists in Cambridge whose collective thinking would eventually become known as ‘Cambridge Platonism’.

Geoffrey Neate (ed.), Memoirs of the City and University of Oxford in 1738 together with Poems, Odd Lines, Fragments & Small Scraps, by ‘Shepilinda’ (Elizabeth Sheppard) (Oxford Historical Society New Series Vol. 47: Oxford, The Boydell Press, 2018), xxxii + 132 pp. ISBN: 9780904107296.

This chapter looks at Geoffrey Neate's present edition on the account of Elizabeth Sheppard of Oxford in January of 1737–8, written under the pen-name of ‘Shepilinda’. The main part of Shepilinda's manuscript is a tour of the Colleges made in the company of an older woman who is nicknamed ‘Scrippy’, and who is the dedicatee of the manuscript. The tour is largely arranged topographically, starting with Worcester in the west and ending with Magdalen in the east. There are then accounts of the academic halls, including the self-consciously bogus one of ‘Frog Hall’, which is actually Shepilinda's family home. This part of the manuscript ends with a description of the Bodleian Library, and the traditions associated with May Day and St. Scholastica's Day. The second, and shorter, part of her manuscript comprises some short poems.

Alfredo Dinis, S.J., A Jesuit against Galileo? The strange case of Giovanni Battista Riccioli Cosmology, ed. Álvaro Balsas, S.J. & Ricardo Barroso Batista (Braga: Universidade católica portuguesa, 2017). xxiii + 364 pp. ISBN: 9789726972822 (Print); 9789726972839 (eBook). Aviva Rothman. The pursuit of harmony. Kepler on cosmos, confession, and community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). viii + 355 pp. ISBN: 9780226497020.

This chapter focuses on the works of Alfredo Dinis and Aviva Rothman. Giovanni Battista Riccioli's principal work, Almagestum novum (1651), so called to indicate a replacement of Ptolemy's classic text, presents much valuable quantitative information, often in tabular form, which astronomers of all religious persuasions found useful. It also contains 49 arguments pro and 77 contra the Copernican system. Much of the late Alfredo Dinis's posthumous book analyses Riccioli's 126 arguments in an endeavour to judge whether they hid a closet Copernican. Meanwhile, little is said by Aviva Rothman about Johannes Kepler's achievements in astronomy. Instead she places much of his work, thought, and aspiration under the concept of harmony. This leitmotiv carries her a long way through Kepler's religious ideas.

The Correspondence and Unpublished Papers of Robert Persons, SJ, ed. Victor Houliston, Ginevra Crosignani, and Thomas M. McCoog, SJ (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2017).

This chapter examines the volume on the letters and papers of the English Jesuit Robert Persons (1546–1610) — the most prominent of the leaders of the early English Mission — edited by Victor Houliston, Ginevra Crosignani, and Thomas M. McCoog, SJ. This volume covers the period in Persons's life from shortly after his expulsion from Balliol College in 1574 to the run up of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The letters in between give a first-hand account of a wide range of crucial events. They cover the conflicts between the Welsh and the English at the Venerable English College in Rome. They also give more than a glimpse into the fateful mission of Persons and Edmund Campion to England in 1580–1581. Letters usefully place this endeavour within the context of global Jesuit missions. The documents show the elitism of the Jesuits, preoccupied above all with the conversion of the gentry. The chapter then considers a number of considerable challenges faced by the editors in putting this correspondence together.