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Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism: the Cambridge Example

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

John Gascoigne
John Gascoigne
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales
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Extract

Oxford has never quite recovered from Matthew Arnold's description of his beloved alma mater as a ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties’. 1 While in popular stereotype Oxford is associated with such movements as the laudians, the Jacobites and the tractarians, Cambridge, by contrast, is seen as the home of more radical and reformist creeds: the puritans, the latitudinarians and the academic reformers of the nineteenth century. Consequently, we are predisposed to think it unremarkable that in the early eighteenth century Cambridge almost totally shed the last vestiges of the scholastic academic order which had its origins in the Tiigh middle ages and, in its place, adopted a style of education which, in its overriding emphasis on mathematics, departed significantly from the curriculum offered at Oxford.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , March 1984 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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