This is the first of a four volume History of the University of Cambridge, under the General Editorship of Professor C.N.L. Brooke, and the first volume on the medieval University as a whole to be published in over a century. It provides a synthesis of the intellectual, social, political, and religious life of the early University, and gives serious attention to the development of classroom studies and how they changed with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Following the first stirrings of the University in the early thirteenth century, the evolution of the University is...

"Can he be a sensible man, sir?" "No, my dear; I think not..." Thus Christopher Brooke prefaces his study of Jane Austen, whose sharp intelligence and wit have been the companions of his leisure for many years. In answer to the question as to whether there can be anything left to be said, Brooke returns rewardingly to her own writing, the novels and the letters, and with a historian's precision reveals new detail and fresh insights. What is the world Jane Austen describes, and how is it related to the world in which she lived? A close reading of each of the major novels leads into a detailed...

Christopher Brooke's account of the history of Gonville and Caius, founded in 1348, describes the workings and development of the institution, the home of men such as William Lyndwood, Jeremy Taylor, Charles Sherrington and seven other Nobel laureates - and of Titus Oates. For the more recent centuries, his rapidly moving narrative provides sketches and anecdotes of its central characters set in the wider context of the history of education, religion, learning and research. The Epilogue to this new edition describes the major events in the history of the College in the late twentieth century....