The writer and recipient of these engaging letters, Alexander Chisholm Gooden (born 1817), went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1836, having previously been educated at the University of London. A glittering academic career beckoned; he was top of the Classical Tripos in 1840, and in the following year went to Germany to read for a Trinity fellowship, but died tragically early from peritonitis after rowing on the Rhine.

The 169 letters between Gooden and his family and friends collected in this volume constitute a rich and hitherto unknown source for student life in Cambridge in the 1830s. They cover a wide range of topics: friendships, local politics, accommodation, clothing and bills, the personalities and vagaries of dons, and Gooden's health. They also give a detailed picture of his career as a student of classics and mathematics, and, after his examination success in 1840, as a private tutor to undergraduates. The differences between Cambridge and London styles of scholarship caused difficulties for Gooden; they offer the reader an unusual and interesting light on his struggle to succeed at Trinity.

An examination of how academic colleges commemorated their patrons in a rich variety of ways.

The character of the English Church at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century has always been a contentious historical issue. Concentrating on Cambridge University - where the critical theological debates took place and where new generations were schooled in learning and prejudice - this book aims to shed new light on the question, making use of a wealth of previously underexploited material from the archives of the University and the Colleges, and paying attention to some significant and unjustly neglected figures.
After setting the scene in the seventeenth-century city and university, the book goes on to provide a careful and detailed analysis of the debate about Anglicans and Puritans, Arminians and Calvinists; it offers a lively account of bitter academic and religious rivalries fought out in sermons, academic exercises and in print.

DAVID HOYLE is Canon Residentiary at Gloucester Cathedral and Director of Ministry in the Diocese of Gloucester.

Robert Willis was the archetypal nineteenth-century polymath. Officially, as Jacksonian Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, he specialized in the study of mechanism, which he also taught at the Royal School of Mines in London. In the field of science he was an experimentalist, inventor and educational innovator. Meanwhile, in his spare time, he pursued his passion, pioneering the serious study of architectural history. Initially his work was aimed at architects - his role in providing an intellectual underpinning to the contemporary Gothic Revival was acknowledged by the award of the gold medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1862. However his main contribution was more historical. Starting with Canterbury, in 1844, over the course of his career, he investigated almost every English cathedral and developed an approach, combining documentary and archaeological research, which remains in use today. His studies culminated in the monumental Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, still the definitive account of its subject. In this fascinating and lavishly illustrated intellectual biography, drawn from extensive archival and architectural research, the author sheds new light on the interconnections between Willis's varied fields of interest and his fundamental role in the creation of a discipline. Alexandrina Buchanan is both an architectural historian and an archivist; her introduction to archives came through cataloguing the papers of Robert Willis at the Cambridge University Library. She is now Lecturer in Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool.