“In Defence of Universities”: Universities and their enemies in early-modern England

From the Chantries Act of 1545 to the Revolution of 1688 the early-modern English universities had a complex and sometimes troubled relationship with state power and with religion. Endowment, expansion and international intellectual optimism was nonetheless increasingly accompanied by vociferous religious critique – a critique which, in the middle years of the seventeenth century, went some way to becoming realised. This paper will offer an interpretation of the politics of English university history from the Reformation to the Revolution, but at its heart will be an account of the significance of an unpublished manuscript book entitled Apologia Academiarum (‘In Defence of Universities’), written in 1596 by Oxford’s most prominent late-Elizabethan author, John Case, of which I am planning to publish the first edition in 2025.

Richard Serjeantson is a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge and a lecturer in history at Cambridge University.