A history of All Souls College under the Wardenship of Bernard Gardiner, that focuses on the ways in which the college and Gardiner were caught between competing visions of what England would look like in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution.

The text of this volume comprises the Chichele Lectures of 1986 on the architectural history of All Souls College. Beginning with a discussion of the college's foundation by Archbishop Chichele in 1438 and the construction of the original medieval buildings, Howard Colvin lays considerablestress on the model afforded by the earlier foundation of New College. He goes on to consider the college's neo-gothic expansion in the early eighteenth century, and the great building work of Nicholas Hawksmoor. Finally, John Simmons discusses the changes that occurred in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, and looks in particular at the alterations to the chapel made by Gilbert Scott in the 1870s. This first architectural history of one of Oxford's most famous colleges is lavishly illustrated throughout, and contains several appendices.

This book investigates the part that Anglicanism played in the lives of lay people in England and Wales between 1689 and 1750. It is concerned with what they did rather than what they believed, and explores their attitudes to clergy, religious activities, personal morality and charitable giving. Using diaries, letters, account books, newspapers and popular publications and parish and diocesan records, Dr Jacob demonstrates that Anglicanism held the allegiance of a significant proportion of all people. They took the lead in managing the affairs of the parishes, which were the major focus of communal and social life, and supported the spiritual and moral discipline of the church courts. He shows that early eighteenth-century England and Wales remained a largely traditional society and that Methodism emerged from a strong church, which was central to the lives of most people.

Established in the early seventeenth century following a bequest to the university by Sir William Sedley, Oxford's Sedleian Professorship of Natural Philosophy is one of the university's oldest professorships. In common with other such positions established around this time, such as the Savilian Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy, for example, its purpose was to provide centrally organised lectures on a specific subject. While the Professorship is now a high-profile research post in applied mathematics, it has previously been held by physicians, an astronomer, and several people in the eighteenth century whose credentials in natural philosophy are much less clear. This edited volume traces the varied history of the chair through the first four centuries of its existence, combining specialised contributions from historians of medicine, of science, of mathematics, and of universities, together with personal reminiscences of some of the more recent holders of the post.

Enlightened Oxford aims to discern, establish, and clarify the multiplicity of connections between the University of Oxford, its members, and the world outside; to offer readers a fresh, contextualised sense of the University's role in the state, in society, and in relation to other institutions between the Williamite Revolution and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the era loosely describable (though not without much qualification) as England's ancien regime. Nigel Aston asks where Oxford fitted in to the broader social and cultural picture of the time, locating the University's importance in Church and state, and pondering its place as an institution that upheld religious entitlement in an ever-shifting intellectual world where national and confessional boundaries were under scrutiny. Enlightened Oxford is less an inside history than a consideration of an institutional presence and its place in the life of the country and further afield. While admitting the degree of corporate inertia to be found in the University, there was internal scope for members so inclined to be creative in their teaching, open new research lines, and be unapologetic Whigs rather than unrepentant Tories. For if Oxford was a seat of learning rooted in its past - and with an increasing antiquarian awareness of its inheritance - yet it had a surprising capacity for adaptation, a scope for intellectual and political pluralism that was not incompatible with enlightened values.

This volume in a series of history of universities contains a mix of chapters and book reviews. The book acts as a tool for the historian of higher education. The volume combines original research and reference material. Topics include teaching and learning in the University of Bologna, religious debates in eighteenth-century University of Oxford, and Richard Bentley's intellectual genesis.

Pevsner calls it 'marvellous'. Yet the reredos of the fi fteenth-century chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, with its combination of medieval niches and statuary by George Gilbert Scott, has remained one of the unsung glories of both medieval perpendicular architecture and Victorian restoration. Informed by recent scientifi c investigation of its stonework and its surviving medieval polychromy, this volume traces for the fi rst time the entire history of the reredos in its architectural and religious context - from the phases of its medieval and early Tudor construction, through its covering up with a succession of baroque and neoclassical decorative schemes, to its uncovering andrestoration in the 1870s. The book provides a novel and revealing vantage point on the artistic, cultural and ecclesiological history of Britain across four centuries.