The first comprehensive history of John Venn’s life and work. John Venn (1834–1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now eclipsed Venn’s own status as one of the most accomplished logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a “highly successful thinker” with much “power of original thought,” Venn had a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll and Charles Sanders Peirce. Venn was heir to a clerical Evangelical dynasty, but religious doubts led him to resign Holy Orders and instead focus on an academic career. He wrote influential textbooks on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational reform, including that of women’s higher education. Moreover, through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the early analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group. This essential book takes readers on Venn’s journey from Evangelical son to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing on Venn’s key writings and correspondence, published and unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the logician’s wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on broader themes in religion, science, and the university in Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many sympathies—sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly contradictory.

Illustrated lining papers.

Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Cambridge explores the archaeology, art, and architecture of Cambridge in the Middle Ages, a city marked not only by its exceptional medieval university buildings but also by remarkable parish churches, monastic architecture, and surviving glass, books, and timber work. The chapters in this volume cover a broad array of medieval, and later, buildings and objects in the city and its immediate surrounds, both from archaeological and thematic approaches. In addition, a number of chapters reflect on the legacy and influence medieval art and architecture had on the later city. Along with medieval colleges, chapels, and churches, buildings in villages outside the city are discussed and analysed. The volume also provides detailed studies of some of the most important master masons, glassmakers, and carpenters in the medieval city, as well as of patrons, building types, and institutional development. Both objects and makers, patrons, and users are represented by its contents. The volume sets the archaeological and art historical analysis in its socio-economic context; medieval Cambridge was a city located on major trade routes and with complex social and institutional differences. In an academic field increasingly shaped by interdisciplinary interest in material culture, Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Cambridge marks a major new contribution to the field, focussing on the complexity, variety, and specificity of the buildings and objects that define our understanding of Cambridge as a medieval city.

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 traced from the original Corporation of Masters and Scholars through the early development of the colleges. The second half of the book focuses on the century from the 1440s to the 1540s, which saw the flowering of the University under Tudor patronage. In the decades preceding the Reformation many colleges were founded, the teaching structures reorganized, and the curriculum made more humanistic. The place of Cambridge at the forefront of northern European universities was eventually assured when Henry VIII founded Trinity College in 1546, in the face of changes and difficulties experienced during the course of the Reformation.

Sets out to reconstruct and analyze the rationality of Phineas Fletcher's use of figurality in The Purple Island (1633) - a poetic allegory of human anatomy. This book demonstrates that the analogies and metaphors of literary works share coherence and consistency with anatomy textbooks.