The Trojan War of 1518: Melodrama, Politics, and the Rise of Humanism

Abstract

Scholarly representations of the rise of humanism in Northern European universities during the sixteenth century have been under some strain since James Overfield's 1982 study, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany, which successfully critiqued earlier positivist narratives through a detailed examination of continental European experience. Students of sixteenth-century England have, by contrast, remained remarkably consistent in arguing that English humanists took over the universities of Oxford and Cambridge during the reign of Henry VIII, and while they did not eliminate the backward scholastics, they had considerable success in making them appear ridiculous. English historiography follows the rhetoric of its sources: humanism is presented as the dawn of the New Age-an intellectual, scholarly achievement. This paper challenges such orthodox representation by examining reactions to the founding of three humanist lectureships at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1518.