The History of the University of Oxford Volume VI: Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 1, ed. by M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys, (review)

BOOK REVIEWS345 The History of the University of Oxford, Volume VI: Nineteenth-Century Oxford , Part 1. Edited by M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys. (NewYork: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1997. Pp. xxxviii,806. $145.00.) This book, part of the official history of the University of Oxford, is indispensable for understanding the modernization of nineteenth-century Oxford. It consists of a collection of essays, some of which trace the narrative of the reform of the university culminating with the passage of the University Tests Act in 1871 and topical chapters that include the university's finances, changing curriculum, including the development of its classical emphasis ("Greats") and the natural sciences, as weU as essays on university institutions up to 1914. The narrative line in the book traces the transformation of the university from a confessional (Anglican) university to a substantiaUy national (secular) one. Anyone who has pondered the themes of Ex Corde Ecclesiae would benefit from reading in this volume. To its credit, this study takes seriously the claims of the older confessional university, whUe pointing to many areas in teaching and scholarship greatly in need of reform, although it does ultimately accept the secular liberal article of faith that free inteUectual inquiry and a reUgious confession for the university are incompatible. M. G. Brock pictures an Oxford in 1800 in which the coUeges, the true centers of the university, were controlled by clergymen, as were the institutions that controUed the university (p. 9). Fellows of the coUeges were expected to remain unmarried (although coUege heads could marry), giving coUeges a monastic feel (p. 28). In an age of revolution, Oxford had adopted classics in 1800 "as a bulwark against the Jacobins" (p. 14). The role of divinity in the curriculum was actuaUy smaU, but what there was, the study of the Gospels in Greek, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, and Butler's Analogy ofReligion, was basic and required. The linchpin of the confessional university was the requirement that no student could matriculate in a college without subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles (subscription in Cambridge was reserved as a condition of graduation) (p. 1 1). In a splendid chapter, L. W B. BrockUss places Oxford in the context of European universities in the revolutionary era from 1789 to 1850. He points out that Oxford and Cambridge were anomaUes in Europe in retaining their emphasis on the arts (p. 81). Oxford in 1800 was what universities had been from 1200 to 1600. Each of the subjects of study had been united, since the Renaissance, through the "same analytical tools: humanist exegetical techniques and Aristotelian verbal logic. Knowledge was truly one" (p. 94). On the European continent , TaUeyrand and Condorcet had agreed in the revolutionary period, that the classics ought to be replaced by mathematics and natural science. Diderot demanded that medicine should replace theology and pubUc health should take the place of heaven as the end of the university as, Diderot judged, "'pubUc health is perhaps the most important of all the objects for which a university exists'" (p. 87). 346BOOK REVIEWS Although Oxford escaped the French Revolution, she did not escape the onslaught of German IdeaUsm. Kant had insisted that phUosophy should be freed from what he believed to be the "stranglehold of theological and political orthodoxy " (p. 105). BrockUss suggests that "the Idealist saw the university as a missionary institution. Henceforth it was to be the breeding-ground of the perfect man. The university would replace the Church as the guardian of mankind's spiritual health" (p. 106). During the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, Oxford's traditional system and Anglican orientation came increasingly under attack. ChaUenges came from outside, through Parliamentary interference and from Protestant Nonconformists who demanded the right to send their sons. The forces for change on the inside proved to be even stronger. Increasingly naturaUstic science became aUuring after 1850; Anglican liberals, in the shape of the "Oriel Noetics" and Broad Churchmen, worked graduaUy against ecclesiastical authority and to open the university to their own latitudinarianism. R B. Nockles shows in a brilUant chapter that the leaders of the Oxford Movement, who had insisted that the...