Edmund of Abingdon

Extract

Master, Fellows, Scholars and Friends of St Edmund’s House:

It is customary on this annual occasion to delve into the scantily recorded life of St Edmund of Abingdon—in order to discover anachronistic references to the work of Newman or Newton upon which the speaker may hang his threadbare argument. In my own case the exploration did not, at first sight, augur well at all: I was indeed christened Edmund, but after the East Anglian Edmund, the patron saint of failed governors rather than of successful scholars; and perhaps even more ominously, one of Edmund of Abingdon’s great quarrels was with my ancestor Maurice Fitzgerald, Justiciar of Ireland. However, as is so often so in such cases, my good wife came to my aid, for St Edmund’s great academic contribution to Oxford, or so Roger Bacon assures us—was the introduction of the New Logic based on the Toledo Translation: in other words, the rendering into Latin of the Arabic versions of the Greek masters made in Cordoba by scholars such as Averroes, while in Europe only the dim Hibernian candle flickered fitfully in the night.

However, although I shall return to St Edmund’s tenuous connexion with Islam at the end of this Address—for having hung one’s garment on a somewhat insecure peg one must presumably take it off before it brings the whole wall down with it—I think it would be more useful to pursue the main practical concern of St Edmund’s life: the relationship between Church, State and University. Specifically, I would like to draw some parallels between the role of Church and University in society in order to derive some implications for the future role of this College.