In considering the personalities who played a part in fourteenth-century intellectual life and controversy, it is only possible here to select a few individuals or groups. In the first place there is a very remarkable series of writers who were Fellows of Merton College, Oxford, in the first half of the fourteenth century.

During the first quarter of the century, the series starts with Walter Burley (c. 1305), the earliest and one of the most influential of the group; he was a logician and commentator on Aristotle with a European fame, being later known as Doctor planus et perspicuus, and had taught at Oxford, Paris and Toulouse. Such an international scholastic career, which had once been common enough, was now beginning to be uncommon, at least among seculars. A slightly junior contemporary was John Mauduit (c. 1309–19), an astronomer.

During the second quarter of the century, we find at Merton the great Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1323–35), the Doctor profundus, remembered chiefly as a theologian for his work De causa Dei contra Pelagianos, but also a writer on mathematics and dynamics; Richard Camsale (c. 1305–26), a logician; John Dumbleton (c. 1338–47), also a logician; Thomas Buckingham (c. 1324–40), a theologian; William Heytesbury (c. 1330–46), a logician and physicist; Simon Bredon (c. 1330–41), an astronomer; John Ashenden (c. 1336–53), also an astronomer.