242 History of Universities
decided to break with Rome. If the order of events had been
reversed, England would undoubtedly have been hostile to
the Renaissance. Erasmus wrote from Cambridge in 1516,
“It is scarcely thirty years ago, when all that was taught in
the university of Cambridge, was . . . those old exercises
out of Aristotle, and quaestiones taken from Duns Scotus.
As time went on, bonae Htterae were introduced; to this
was added a knowledge of mathematics; a new, or at least a
regenerated, Aristotle sprang up; then came an acquaintance
with Greek, and with a host of new authors. . . .” In this
same year, 1516, Bishop Fox founded Corpus Christi Col-
lege at Oxford, dedicated to the New Learning, and with
the especial purpose of fostering a knowledge of the Greek
Church Fathers. Oxford, after passing through a period of
violent opposition to the New Learning, accepted both it and
the reform with almost fanatical zeal in 1535. The works
of the “subtle doctor” Duns Scotus, the quintessence of ultra-
refined scholasticism, were torn, burned, thrown out of li-
braries. New College quadrangle was “full of the leaves of
Dunce, the wind blowing them into every corner”; and the
name of him who had once been the idol of the schools be-
came the common English word for a school blockhead.
In the next half-century, the English colleges worked out
a typically English compromise between medieval philosophy
and classical belles-lettres. The official curriculum of the
university required so small a part of a student’s time that
the colleges were able to supplement it by requirements of
their own, along comparatively modern lines. In the cur-
riculum that one college tutor, Dr. Holdsworth of St. Johns
and Emmanuel, described around 1640, we find that stu-
dents were supposed to read about five hours a day, to take
careful notes on their reading, and to attend their tutor’s
college lectures. Mornings they spent on studies of medieval