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.

In Jennifer Summit’s account, libraries are more than inert storehouses of written tradition; they are volatile spaces that actively shape the meanings and uses of books, reading, and the past. Considering the two-hundred-year period between 1431, which saw the foundation of Duke Humfrey’s famous library, and 1631, when the great antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton died, Memory’s Library revises the history of the modern library by focusing on its origins in medieval and early modern England. Summit argues that the medieval sources that survive in English collections are the product of a Reformation and post-Reformation struggle to redefine the past by redefining the cultural place, function, and identity of libraries. By establishing the intellectual dynamism of English libraries during this crucial period of their development, Memory’s Library demonstrates how much current discussions about the future of libraries can gain by reexamining their past.