This chapter tracks Morris’s biographical involvements with Oxford across his lifetime, and examines the role of Oxford, as both city and university, in prompting the radical political commitments of his later years. On his arrival there as an undergraduate in 1853, he was deeply disillusioned with the official teaching of the university, but made a number of formative friendships which opened to him new cultural and social horizons. The intellectual influence of John Ruskin interacted with Morris’s own intense response to Oxford’s ancient architecture to propel him further in the direction of social critique. In later years, as activist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris threw himself into campaigns to protect key Oxford sites. As a socialist activist from 1883, he regarded Oxford as an important city to capture for the cause, lecturing there on socialism no less than six times (ably assisted by his old friend Charles Faulkner, who founded the Oxford branch of the Socialist League). We can also trace links between the Bodleian Library’s holdings and Morris’s own publishing venture, the Kelmscott Press; and Oxford plays a significant role in both the local imagery and overall geography of his utopia News from Nowhere.

Two versions of the Life of the St. Frideswide (650-727) of Oxford exist, in rather different Latin styles though both written in the twelfth century, one more simple, the other more literary (probably the work of Robert of Cricklade, prior of St. Frideswide’s in the twelfth century. It is on this site that the present Christ Church cathedral was built. Parallel passages are given from these two versions to allow comparisons between the content and the language and style.

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.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the English Province developed a much stronger educational apostolate through publications, newspaper articles, university lectures, and new houses in the university cities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Stellenbosch in Southern Africa. This was complemented by the opening of a boys school at Laxton in Northamptonshire followed later by a prep school at Llanarth, and later still of a Conference Centre, Spode House, at Hawkesyard. Much of the growth can be traced to the leadership given by Bede Jarrett, Provincial for four terms from 1916 to 1932, who also initiated the mission in Southern Africa. However, the Province maintained its parish commitments, and by the end of the 1950s the Province was stretched too thinly to ensure the well-running of each house. Community and parish life at Pendleton deteriorated to the point where there was no option other than closure of the priory and withdrawal from the parish.

Lionel Johnson is more famous now for his life (and death) than his work – for his alcoholism and insomnia, conversion to Catholicism, erroneous claims to Irish heritage, and death by severe brain haemorrhage at the age of thirty-five. As a founding member of the Rhymers’ Club and contributor to the notorious Yellow Book, he is frequently referred to as a major figure of British Decadence, but his work is rarely considered in any detail. This chapter looks at Johnson’s criticism, poetry, and letters as expressive of a religious humanism heavily influenced by Pater’s sensuously continent aestheticism. No one was more excited by the world than Johnson, by the crowds of London as much as by the wonders of nature, and the continence he described was hardly a cloistered retreat. But sex was at the heart of what he saw as wrong in the modern world: its lack of respect for tradition; its bad manners; the haste that led people to look to their own uncultivated selves for a guide to right and wrong. Like Pater, Johnson portrayed continence as a sociable practice, leading to better relationships with people, objects, and the past.

Chapter 8 studies the often painful changes to the Province in the aftermath of Vatican II as traditional ministries and ways of life were greatly altered, but also what and who enabled the Province to adapt to changed cirsumstances in ways that made possible a viable future for the friars in the twenty-first century.

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.

This chapter considers John Henry’s Newman’s correspondences from when he turned his face Romeward, in 1843, through to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. First, I relate the six-year delay in his converting both to his late release of news of his true religious opinions to three close friends and colleagues and to the way in which, when finally written, the most painful letters enact delay syntactically. Behind these delays lay a reluctance to inflict pain on others by leaving what he called ‘the English Church’, abandoning the struggle to reclaim its catholic identity through the Oxford Movement, attaching himself to what many regarded as the Antichrist and thus cutting off his closest friends and relations. Second, I contrast two correspondences that came to a head in 1844 and 1845, one with two of his disciples, the other with his sister Jemima. Finally, I examine some letters from the time of Newman’s reception. Intimacy involves honesty, and in the letters of 1843–45 Newman was torn between confiding in a correspondent and endangering their own settlement of mind. He warned his friend Henry Edward Manning, the other future ‘convert cardinal’, about engaging in a ‘dangerous correspondence’.

Samuel Griffith went to New College, Oxford University, after retiring on March 1, 1956. He had made contact with Basil Liddell Hart by the middle of 1957, and Liddell Hart soon agreed to read and comment on Griffith’s dissertation. Liddell Hart made extensive comments on the dissertation as it was being read, and Griffith mentions reading Liddell Hart’s Strategy: The Indirect Approach. Griffith also believed that Chinese strategy was fundamentally different than Western strategy, with the possible exception of Liddell Hart’s strategy. Griffith also assumed, and consequently asserted without evidence, that Mao Zedong’s strategy was consistent with Sunzi. This was also due to Griffith’s connection between guerrilla warfare, Mao, and Sunzi, a connection that was particularly strong because he had translated Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare when he was in China. Griffith also asserted that Communist strategy, even before Mao, was based on Sunzi. It was also important for the dissertation to try to determine whether Sunzi had been influential in Western military thought before the twentieth century. Griffith’s biases, in addition to those of Liddell Hart, affected his choice of translation terms as much the introductory explanation of Sunzi.

In the last chapter I looked at several more or less reasonable – as well as several more or less outlandish – attempts to make representative democracy work. From the “suppositional” designs of ballot boxes to the intricacies of Hare’s machinery to the representational aspirations of the realist novel, the things I considered were variously committed to the idea that, given the right system, one could accurately represent the will of a single individual and then somehow aggregate the accurate representations of many individuals into yet another, accurate second-order representation of the will-of-all. As the figures I looked at understood, this isn’t easy – first, because any effort to represent the will of an individual relies on a complicated and maybe impossible set of assumptions about what an individual is and, second, because, even if one could settle on a way to represent an individual, arriving at a meaningful second-order representation of the aggregation of other representations is itself wickedly difficult. Before one could settle on an electoral design for parliamentary and other elections, one had to decide whether political representation was supposed to represent what individuals thought, what different types of individuals thought, what the state thought, what a party thought, what a strategic coalition of parties thought, what different places thought, what simple majorities thought, or what the people as le Peuple thought. These were and still are hard problems. Despite that, the figures I looked at believed in parliamentary democracy; they believed in its power, its potential, and its seemingly limitless capacity for expansion and reform.

Emmy Noether received notification of dismissal from her university post in Göttingen in April 1933 and had to look for a position outside of Germany to continue her mathematical research. By the end of the year, she moved to Bryn Mawr College in the United States and started to give guest lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. in February 1934. Her move was successful, but Noether initially considered going to Moscow and Oxford. She was enthusiastic about both options and even accepted an offer from Somerville College, Oxford. This chapter recovers the documents left in the Weston Library and Somerville College, the University of Oxford and Bryn Mawr College and recounts the effort of Pavel Sergeyevich Alexandroff and Helen Darbishire, who wished to help Noether and her academic career when she was forced to leave Göttingen.

Chapter 5 focuses on the changes in the editorial profession that resulted from the rise to prominence of the New Bibliography and shows how the consolidation of editorial authority and the increasingly quasi-scientific method (or mystique) of the New Bibliography worked to exclude women from its editorial ranks. This resulted in a significant decrease of woman-edited editions around the middle of the twentieth century. Continuing previous discussion of male collaborators, it demonstrates that well into the twentieth century, women editors’ successes still relied in part on finding a way into the primarily masculine network of editors via their male colleagues and allies, focusing on the careers of Grace Trenery, Una Ellis-Fermor, Alice Walker, and Evelyn Simpson.

Chapter 3 moves beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of “foreign” lands in medieval English romance. Despite the allure of fantasy and exotic settings endemic to the genre of romance, many Middle English texts create imaginative landscapes that delineate recognizably English topography. Intriguingly, such passages of landscape description also focus primarily on urban landscapes, emphasizing the economic and political interconnectedness of town and countryside. I look at similarities between these scenes, and consider why certain details come to be associated with these imaginative landscape settings in the texts of Titus and Vespasian and Kyng Alisaunder surviving in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622, a manuscript saturated with tales of the Holy Land and the Far East. These texts may champion the ability of landscape engineers to reshape the base clay of Creation, but they also use the distant lands of the Middle and Far East as spaces to contemplate the hubris of such actions in a Christian universe – especially in the increasingly hazardous ecological events English readers experienced at the close of the Middle Ages.

John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University remains one of the classics of the philosophy of higher education. Composed in several parts in Dublin in the 1850s, it can only be properly understood in the context of the creation and relative failure of the Catholic University of Ireland, of which Newman was the first rector; although written by an Englishman, it is in several important respects an Irish book, shaped by and for Irish conditions. But it also draws on Newman’s own experiences, particularly of Oxford. Newman’s views on higher education were shaped by the debates of the 1810s and 1820s on the purpose and nature of higher education, and then by his own experiences as a fellow and tutor of Oriel College. It is the fusion of Ireland and Oxford that lies at the core of Newman’s classic text.

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.