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Reviewed by:
  • Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge, 1502 to 1649
  • Elisabeth Leedham-Green
Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge, 1502 to 1649. By Patrick Collinson, Richard Rex, and Graham Stanton. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. vi, 98. $15.99 paperback.)

This sprightly little volume has its origins in lectures given in Cambridge by Patrick Collinson and Richard Rex to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Lady Margaret Beaufort's Professorship in Divinity. These origins remain undisguised in the two main sections of the book: Richard Rex on "Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professorship, 1502–1559," and Patrick Collinson on "Some Lady Margaret's Professors of Divinity, 1559–1649." These two lectures are encased by an introduction by the current Lady Margaret's Professor, Dr. Graham Stanton, and by appendices—I: the traditional list of the professors from 1502 to 2002; II: an amended list for the years 1498 to 1560; III: a list of the Lady Margaret's benefactions from 1502 to 1504, and of subsequent endowments of the chair (extracted from J. W. Clark's Endowments of the University of Cambridge [1904]); and III: curiously entitled "The Lady Margaret's Professorship in 1824" comprising a text printed by George Dyer in his two-volume Privileges of the University of Cambridge, published indeed in 1824, but reproducing a section from Robert Hare's manuscript Liber privilegiorum et libertatum alme universitatis Camtabrigiensis of c. 1587.

There are other signs of haste, doubtless due to an anxiety to publish the book in the anniversary year (although in the event it came out in 2003), even on the copyright page where a mysterious Richard Stanton figures as an author. Excessive severity, however, would be out of place in discussing a book which pretends more to the status of a keepsake than a presentation of new research, with one notable exception. [End Page 810]

The introduction, by Graham Stanton, the current Lady Margaret's Professor, is a masterpiece of the wide view, taking us from the foundation of the chair, dwelling much, as is proper, on John Fisher, the first occupant of the chair, and taking us up to the present day, with particularly engaging accounts of Charlie Moule and others within memory. He ends, as who in such a position must not in these days, with a plea for a new endowment, provoking comparison of the present day with the mid-nineteenth century, when Cambridge boasted five professors of divinity, the Christian Advocate and three endowed preacherships, including, of course, the Lady Margaret's.

Richard Rex expands on John Fisher's theology, a subject which Rex has handled in depth in his The Theology of John Fisher (1991), and on his influence on Lady Margaret, the King's Mother, and suggests him as the patron saint of fund-raisers. It is in Rex's chapter that new discoveries are revealed. The lists of most Cambridge University officers, before about 1540, have had to be constructed from a variety of more or less accidental sources. Rex, by consulting records of the Court of Augmentations, of Queens' College, Cambridge, and of Westminster Abbey has managed to both add to and subtract names from the list printed in the Historical Register of the University of Cambridge (1917), a list, he surmises, originally drawn up by the antiquary Thomas Baker in 1708. The case for Erasmus having held the post is severely undermined, if not demolished, but his loss is more than compensated by the astonishing addition to the list in 1549 of Sir John Cheke, well-qualified indeed as the editor of the Greek text of two Chrysostom sermons (1543) and the translator of his De providentia Dei, ac fato (1545), and at the time Provost of King's, but surely, as Rex observes, the first layman to hold a theological office in Cambridge (and probably the only one until the 1970's). Rex deals in some detail with the earliest professors, and is able to supply information even on the probable subject of Humphrey Walkden's lectures. Dealing with George Bullock, one of Cambridge's earliest humanists, he quaintly renders...

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