In 1907, fresh from his studies with Ravel, Ralph Vaughan Williams returned to Cambridge for a performance of his recent Towards the Unknown Region, and was captivated by the ‘new spirit’ revitalizing its cultural institutions. His music was warmly received, and at that critical point in his life, encouraged, while its academic dimension helped him to confirm his self-belief and refine his ideas. His music was played, discussed, and appreciated through local performances of his recent compositions, the Wasps, early chamber music, and his first opera, Hugh the Drover. In the years up to the First World War, he experimented with different styles, and in a sympathetic atmosphere discussed his new compositions, his developing views on teaching, and on the place of music in everyday life. His early Cambridge connections continued to play active roles throughout Vaughan Williams’s long creative life.

It is not hard to find examples of the use of Latin in nineteenth-century Cambridge to reject modernity or to mystify and police the boundaries of elite status and existing social and imperial hierarchies. But concentration on such examples obscures a history of the expression of radical ideas in Latin and of engagement with here-and-now issues. How can we incorporate such complexity into our understanding of the history of Latin studies, and avoid mistaking one side of an argument for the standard view of the elite? And how should Latin face its future or even its present? We should be brave enough to insist that the history of ‘western civilisation’ (not uniquely admirable or the only one to deserve attention) is incomprehensible without Latin.

This chapter explores the fascination that the biblical apocrypha held for Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) and explains his relationship to contemporary Cambridge scholarship that pioneered the study of those texts in the context of New Testament scholarship. It places MRJ’s work on the biblical apocrypha within his wider fascination for ‘old stories’, and considers the similarities between his scholarly work on Greek apocrypha and pseudepigrapha and his activities as a medievalist and codicologist, with particular reference both to manuscript studies and to his interpretation of the sculpture in the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral.

Chapter 8 is about the trial of Tinkler Ducket, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who in 1739 was arraigned before the Vice-Chancellor’s court in Cambridge accused of atheism on the basis of a letter he had written four years earlier, in which he gloried at having reached ‘the Top, the ne plus ultra of atheism’. The case was dominated by the testimony of Mary Richards, who accused Ducket of attempting to seduce her, and less attention was paid to a remarkable defence speech that Ducket made, in which he argued for the right to freedom of thought and private judgement and claimed that an atheist might be a perfectly moral being. Various witnesses were called, most of whom attested to Ducket’s good character, but the court declared him guilty, and he was expelled from the university. It is argued that the case illustrates a degree of complacency, combined with sensationalism, on the part of the authorities, which made its outcome a foregone conclusion. An appendix lists the various accounts of Ducket’s trial.

The city of Cambridge is famous for its university and magnificent college buildings along the Backs. It is also renowned for science, technology and innovation. The recent hi-tech boom has given the city its nickname ‘Silicon Fen. This book explains how a small medieval town on the edge of the fens developed into a city with leading university, science park and biomedical campus. Throughout, the author shows how the history of both Town and University are inextricably linked. When the first scholars arrived in 1209, Cambridge was already a thriving market town and inland port, which hosted Stourbridge Fair, one of the largest fairs in medieval Europe. This illustrated history looks at Cambridge from prehistoric to modern times. It traces the origins of the first iron-age settlement, the Roman fort, the growth of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking town, and how Cambridge gained status as a medieval town. The growth of the University is explored from the 13th century to the present day, and includes Cambridge figures such as Newton, Darwin, Turing, Crick, Watson, and Hawking. The story is brought up to the present, drawing on recent research and archaeological finds in the 21st century.

The realization that radio astronomers could detect radio galaxies that were well beyond the limits of even the most powerful optical telescopes suggested that radio observations might be able to distinguish between the two competing cosmological models. The commonly accepted big-bang model required that, since the Universe continued to evolve with time, so the distant (younger) Universe should appear different than the nearby modern Universe. By contrast, the steady-state theory required that the Universe is, and always was, everywhere the same, so distant galaxies should look the same as more nearby galaxies. An intense controversy developed between radio astronomers in Sydney, Australia and Cambridge, UK over the distribution of radio sources and their implication for theories of cosmology. The Australian radio astronomers, who had better data than the Cambridge research workers, found no evidence of cosmic evolution. The Cambridge group, led by Martin Ryle, misunderstood the effects of their instrumental errors and used an incorrect analysis – but got the right answer, arguing that the Universe is evolving with time, contrary to the expectations of the steady state-theory.

Chapter 3 examines the phenomenon of “nations” at the medieval English universities, that is, the means by which students were segregated as northern or southern within the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge (determined by whether they hailed from North or South of the Trent), and these distinctions of provenance were based on the models at Bologna and Paris. This chapter demonstrates several instances of marked violence between the “nations” at Oxford and Cambridge, focusing primarily on the Stamford Schism of the early-1330s wherein several northern students fled Oxford, under persecution, for a studium at Stamford (Lincolnshire) where they engaged an extant learning community. King Edward III recognized the threat posed to England’s universities by such flight and he moved quickly to settle the matter. The intense rivalries in the Schism are evident in two overlooked Latin poems written by students during the conflict, which this chapter analyses. The proceeding years of negotiation to end the Schism illustrate the importance of the universities to England’s burgeoning nationalism and, thus, the role that the North–South divide played in it.

There was nothing new in book thefts. For centuries, booksellers, libraries and individuals have all suffered to a greater or lesser degree, and the purpose of the thefts has not necessarily been venal. In three notorious cases discussed here the motives were mixed. Consideration of Trinity College, Cambridge, Count Libri and French libraries, thefts from the Colombina library in Spain. The inadequacies of libraries in facing thefts.

This essay is based on a singular archive of “relations” made by lay people when they were made candidates for church membership in New World Cambridge, Massachusetts ca. 1638–1648. In these narratives, women and men recall the social experience of being among the “godly” in England, reflect on the decision to emigrate, and above all, map the ups and downs of their spiritual histories. These “relations” are paired with sermons preached by Thomas Shepard, the town minister, who addressed the same topics both in sermons and in a journal. Bringing these two sources together makes it possible to explore various dimensions of lay experience and pastoral perspective: continuities between old and New England, disruptions and self-critiques arising out of the transition to Massachusetts, echoes of the “Antinomian” controversy and its objections to some aspects of the practical divinity. Overall, this essay will attempt to redefine “Reformation” as a challenging mixture of the local and the general, and of adaptation and continuity.

This chapter is concerned with the British classical scholar Jane Harrison. Harrison is most commonly invoked in contemporary classical scholarship for her part in the controversial ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ movement of the early twentieth century. Harrison was a central part of the intellectual genealogy of modernism, and a central reason that so many modernist authors made use of parallels with antiquity. This chapter suggests that by studying the changing valence of Nietzschean antiquity across her intellectual project it is possible to discern her altering attitude towards the value of the past in the present. After discussing the connection between anthropology, primitivism and Classics that yokes together the understandings of ancient irrationalism in both Nietzsche and Harrison, the chapter proceeds to consider the connections with James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as well as Wittgenstein’s critique of that work. The final sections focus on two of Harrison’s main works, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), and the confluence of Dionysus, satyrs and religious belief in these works.

Examining the Pareto Circle of thinkers who gathered at Harvard as many disciplines were beginning to articulate themselves and their methods, we look at the interdisciplinary birth of business studies and at the case study method. We argue that this history should be remembered, taught, and utliized in new interdisciplinary pursuits by management education and management studies more generally.