Heresy, Authority and Filial Piety: The Universities and their Reformation Past

Abstract

The universities played a pivotal role in the shaping of English religious consciousness during the seventeenth century. Their own religious identity was, however, subject to considerable flux and factiousness. As some scholars have recently observed, the theological debates' emotional charge was increased by attempts within them to create and manipulate a national Reformation 'past'. This was, however, also the period in which the universities began intensely to investigate and reflect on their own history. This essay will explore how the early investigators of the universities' medieval relgious life and part in the Reformation were effected by the crises of the Jacobean and Caroline Church. The exploration is focused on the contrasting approaches of Thomas Fuller's History of the University of Cambridge (1655) and Anthony Wood's History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1675). The piece also explores how influential on these contrasting writers was John Foxe's 'authoritative' depiction of the universities' religious past in Acts and Monuments.