The Oxford Movement in the 1830s prompted some formidable theological scholarship which profoundly affected the lives and personalities of many Oxford-educated Church of England clergymen, not a few of whom combined deeply scholarly lives with successful parish ministries. This essay examines the lives of two such men, Canon T.F. Simmons, a parish priest in Yorkshire for some thirty years, and Bishop Mandell Creighton, much of whose scholarly writing was produced in a remote Northumberland parish before his return to Cambridge and London. By the end of the century such learned clergymen were becoming a rarity in the Church of England.

The myth of Oxford, which echoes and replicates the ideology of an unchanging world of privileged white youth, is a common trope in many films and literary works. This vision is, however, overlaid and underlaid with counter-traditions that decenter Oxford and instead insert Oxford upside down into other epistemologies, geographies, and networks. Some attempts at the transformation of elite institutions such as Oxford inadvertently serve to continue the centering of these same institutions. Coetzee argues that, instead of focusing on the histories of ascendant Black/black excellence and achievement at Oxford University, a more powerful way to relativize and decenter the institution is to document and emphasize histories and accounts of Black marginalization, failure, and disconnection.

Pusey is often characterised as obscurantist and conservative in his rejection of the higher literary criticism of the Bible in the later part of the nineteenth century. Much of the criticism of Pusey has focused on a limited assessment of Pusey as a scriptural scholar and on unfair psychological analysis. This article examines Pusey's epistemology more deeply and concludes that he had a breadth of vision which commends itself to the modern world as a critique of reason rather than a rejection of reason. Pusey's role as a biblical scholar is reassessed within the broad context of the Oxford Movement.

Childe's time as a student in Oxford has received little critical attention, partly because of an apparent lack of evidence. His reasons for going to Oxford are explored, and attention is drawn to two factors: the role of one of his tutors in Sydney, W.J. Woodhouse; and the state of prehistoric European studies in England at the time, dominated by Oxford and the figures of Arthur Evans and John Myres. Childe's study visit to Greece in 1915 is discussed and it is suggested that he had already embarked on his major research project before it was interrupted by the unexpected duration of the First World War. He left Oxford in 1917 to return to Australia, and though he may have feared conscription, the impossibility of pursuing his archaeological research was also a critical factor. In 1921 Childe returned to England and soon resumed the project he had started and suspended.