Blair Worden
Royal and Ancient
John Aubrey and the Advancement of Learning
By William Poole
The Bodleian Library 111pp £25 order from our bookshop
The Life of Anthony Wood in His Own Words
By Nicolas K Kiessling (ed)
The Bodleian Library 256pp £35 order from our bookshop
A Dodo at Oxford: The Unreliable Account of a Student and His Pet Dodo
By Philip Atkins and Michael Johnson (ed)
Oxgarth Press 151pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
‘Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs.’ On the face of it, Matthew Arnold’s elegiac depiction of Oxford University stands up. In the civil war of the 1640s, Charles I made Oxford his home and ran the royalist war effort from his lodgings in Christ Church. After his defeat, Oxford confronted parliamentarian rule with resourceful obstruction. Even when the victorious Puritans had brought in the New Model Army and had forcibly replaced half the dons, they could not supplant the university’s underlying royalism and Anglicanism. At the Restoration, Oxford’s antiquary Anthony Wood recorded that the rejoicing there exceeded that of ‘any place of its bigness’. The loyalties forged by civil war had come to stay. Under the long Whig ascendancy that followed the Revolution of 1688, Oxford was a bastion of high-church Toryism.
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