Abstract
This paper takes us back to seventeenth-century Oxford and the undergraduate Arts curriculum. Opening with a summary of how we know about the early modern Oxford Arts experience—from university statutes, printed books, catalogues, commonplace books, and annotated textbooks—the paper then focuses on a lesser studied source, though not one that has missed Mordechai Feingold’s attention, namely the genre of the “curricular crib.” These bare-bone summaries of the undergraduate subjects, almost tabular in many instances, are a glimpse into the very beginnings of the undergraduate Arts experience. Further, the paper shows that, in some instances, as in the “crib” from the rector of Exeter, John Prideaux (1578–1650), a “crib” could affirm the traditional Aristotelian curriculum but a gifted teacher could manipulate and modernize his text, so that pedagogy and scholastic instruction engaged with current trends in research.
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Notes
- 1.
The line is of course hard to draw in some cases. Thinking of subject-specific textbooks, Pemble 1630, five Oxford editions to 1685, and Whitby 1684, four Oxford editions to 1724, provide two examples, from earlier and later in the century, of textbooks tersely enough expressed to show some kinship with the ‘crib’, but not terse enough for conflation.
- 2.
Costello 1958, 45–55. He discusses, for instance, Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. V. 47, a small quarto compendium of logic of the later seventeenth century, described in the catalogue as ‘a collection of mere skeletons’. See Costello 1958, 179, n. 38, for some other pertinent Cambridge manuscripts.
- 3.
For an early reference to the practice, see Melville 1842, 25, recalling how in 1571–2 his regent at St Leonard’s College, St Andrews, communicated to his pupils a ‘compend’ of logic, which Melville welcomed. There were 36 students in Melville’s year.
- 4.
Shepherd 1983, 1–15, esp. 11–12.
- 5.
Dickinson 1952, xxxviii–xl, and Part II, Accounts, under 2, 14, 26 February 1713, 24 April 1713, 14 May 1713, 24 June 1713, 10 February 1715.
- 6.
E.g., British Library, MS Add. 62398, a French example from 1675; and British Library, MS Add. 61916, dictates on logic delivered at the English College at Douai by Laurence Mayes, professor of philosophy and divinity, and taken down by Sir George Jerningham in 1699.
- 7.
E.g., Glasgow University Library, MS Gen. 10, from lectures of 1677–79, where the various systemata mundi are compared in diagram at the end of the manuscript; and MS Gen. 69, from 1699, where among the notes on physics we can observe Peripatetic, Cartesian, and ‘Epicurean’ models being compared, e.g. p. 291. See further Forbes 1983, 28–37.
- 8.
The English Short-Title Catalogue lists 13 editions of Samuel Smith’s Aditus ad logicam, all printed in either Oxford or London, between 1613 and 1684; 14 editions of Edward Brerewood’s Elementa logicæ, likewise all printed in either Oxford or London, between 1614 and 1684; and 14 editions of Robert Sanderson’s Logicæ artis compendium between 1622 and 1680, all printed in Oxford. Sanderson achieved eight more editions in eighteenth-century Oxford. Compare the table in Madan Oxford Books, 1931, iii, 448, who counted only 30 of these editions.
- 9.
- 10.
Bodleian, B 12.2 Linc is an obvious student copy of Scheibler, with some entertaining doodles. Scheibler achieved several Oxford imprints; his 1637 Metaphysica has a preface by Thomas Barlow, whose Exercitationes de Deo were published with this edition.
- 11.
Keckermann 1602, for instance, a short text in three books (on simple terms, on proposition, and on syllogism and method), and consisting of simple statements followed by longer glosses in smaller type, would be very easy to strip back to an even shorter digest. Keckermann, of course, went in the other direction, releasing the text again (Geneva, 1603), pleniore methodo.
- 12.
- 13.
Compare Holdsworth of Cambridge, who preferred for the purpose the written notes of tutors to printed texts, ‘because those that are printed are most of them fitter for riper judgements’ Costello 1958, 46.
- 14.
Feingold 1997, 296.
- 15.
As Madan 1895–1931, no. 2031, noted, Prideaux appears authorially as ‘Jo: P: Col: Exon:’—scarcely how the Bishop of Worcester, as Prideaux was from 1641, would authorially style himself in 1648.
- 16.
Both neatly illustrated by one compiler in 1689–90, being MS Top. Oxon c 368, Thomas Dickenson’s extensive analytic tables of the Arts, in folio, and dated 1689; and MS Top. Oxon e 287, the same Dickenson’s 28 numbered Quaestiones Theologicae, in quarto, and dated 7 March 1690 (probably he matr. Pembroke, 1690). For more tables, see British Library, MS Add. 35342, including ‘Logicae hypotiposis succinctissima memoriae reddenda’, a brief tabular summary of a system of logic, probably in the hand of John Poulett (matr. Exeter College, 1632).
- 17.
I have not, for instance, had the leisure to establish the nature of British Library, MS Add. 70590, the 1657 Oxford notebook of William Trumbull (matr. All Souls, 1655), including a logic; or MS Harleian 5043, the collectiones logicae, ethicae, and physicae of Nehemiah Rogers (matr. Queen’s, 1674), in use in 1677. There are several other potential examples in the British Library.
- 18.
For a slightly earlier comparison, see New College, MS 340, item 5. Compare too British Library, MS Lansdowne 797, stated in the catalogue to be: ‘The School Exercises in Logick of one John Cole, chiefly compiled from Kechermanni Systema Logices, Fonseca, Scotus, Sanderson, Zabarella, Regius, Javellus, Byerwood [i.e. Brerewood] and Toletus’.
- 19.
I cannot find a specific printed source for this list, but the conclusion on Columbus and Rodrigo de Triana probably derives from the evergreen Heylyn (1652), book 4, ch. 2, 97, his Mikrokosmos being a work on most student bookshelves in the period.
- 20.
Feingold 1997, 293.
- 21.
The only suitable John Kent listed by Kirby 1888 was from Silhampton, Wiltshire, and Kirby’s boy must be the right one, but as long as Foster in the Alumni Oxonienses 1891–92 got the right student if the wrong background (he thought Kent was from Abingdon), then this would place the commencement and probably the main use of this manuscript in Kent’s first year, as one would expect.
- 22.
Similar positioning can be seen in the printed tradition too: see Airay 1660, sg. [*4]v.
- 23.
Bodleian, MS Rawl. D 262, evidently in use in the 1690s in University College as it contains addresses to Arthur Charlett and John Hudson. It covers only moral philosophy (claimed falsely by Rawlinson to be a ‘Compendium of Dr. Mores Ethicks’ (fol [i]r)), and Aristotelian physics—but not logic. The versos have been left blank for additions and notes, although not exploited thus.
- 24.
Poole 2010, pp. 172–73.
- 25.
For Felton’s text, see Feingold 1990, 25. Compare British Library, MS Sloane 2613, another seventeenth-century collection containing both ‘Abbreviationes Feltonienses de Cartesio’ and Thomas Thomkinson’s ‘Logica quædam’. For more on Cartesian notebooks and systems in circulation in Cambridge at the time see Kearney 1970, 151. Cartesianism was also promoted by the often-cited textbooks of Antoine Le Grand; but these, although nominally aimed at the university market, where not themselves products of the universities, nor printed there.
- 26.
The fellows of Exeter College purchased it for the library to mark both the anniversary and the rectorship of Frances Cairncross (Rector 2004–14). It is now also available in digital form through the college’s website. Since the completion of this chapter, John Maddicott’s excellent Between Scholarship and Church Politics: The Lives of John Prideaux, 1578-1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) has appeared, which contains some valuable comments on this manuscript and Prideaux’s other educational texts.
- 27.
But see Bodleian, MS Marshall 14, a basic seventeenth-century folio textbook in geometry, trigonometry, geodesy, stereometry, and gnomonics. It is beautifully done, in colour, but is not dated (though it must be before 1685, the date of Thomas Marshall’s bequest to the library). The manuscript is not in Marshall’s hand, however, and has no indication of authorship.
- 28.
Wood 1813–20, iii, 269.
- 29.
Exeter College, MS 235, fol. [3]r.
- 30.
Incidentally, this work is explicitly attributed to Hall on fols. [8]v and [123]v, both references predating John Milton’s well-known attribution of 1642.
- 31.
Exeter College, MS 235, fol. [8]v.
- 32.
Exeter College, MS 235, fol. [123]v; compare An Easy and Compendious Introduction (1672 ed.), pp. 349–50, where More, Bacon, and Barclay are gathered with Xenophon’s Cyrus, as ‘Romances that point at policy’. But though Prideaux knows that Bishop Hall wrote the Mundus Alter et Idem, he does not appear to know that Bishop Godwin was the author of The Man in the Moone.
- 33.
The first edition is Madan 1895–1931, no. 2001 (‘There is much odd learning and many diverting conceits which make the book readable, but there is a lamentable amount of ‘cram’ in it. The third part is entirely about English history and is calculated to make a modern historian gasp. The ‘Inquiries’ are suggestive subjects for debate’). For an interleaved copy see Bodleian, 4o P 77 Th., the 1648 edition, extensively annotated seemingly by one Robert Jones, but given to the library by John Prideaux himself, with the date 12 April 1648. For the abortive revision see Bodleian, 4o Rawl. 582, a copy of the 1682 edition interleaved by Francis Lee of St John’s College. Lee had matriculated in 1679. It would seem that this was his effort to produce a revised edition perhaps sometime in the mid-1680s; he would later leave the university as a non-Juror. Both are most interesting copies.
- 34.
- 35.
This polemical ‘centuriating’ technique was itself a perhaps deliberately old-fashioned strategy rooted in the (admittedly less alarmingly expressed) sixteenth-century schema of John Foxe, itself derived from the continental Lutheran Magdeburg Centuriators (see Quantin 2009, 69–70).
- 36.
Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O. 3. 24, pp. 1–35 (‘A compendium leading to prophane History’), 37–80 (‘Historica. A direction for the orderly reading of the English History’). Among the doodles in the front end papers is the signature of one ‘James Grassell’, who is however untraced. I am most grateful to Richard Serjeantson for sharing his notes on Prideaux with me, part of an evolving database of such pedagogical printed texts and manuscripts.
- 37.
The Trinity manuscript text of the ‘Prophane History’, for instance, concludes the second chapter’s inquiries with an eleventh query, not present in the Exeter manuscript, and so not derivable from it: ‘Whether . . . Philippus Arabs [sic] weare the first Emperor christened’, with the annotation ‘negat Scaliger’. (The query turns on Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 6.34.) And yet the Trinity text is deficient is some respects too, omitting, for instance, the final set of inquiries of the concluding chapter of the ‘Prophane History’, present in the Exeter text. As for the English history, it differs markedly in phrasing between the two witnesses, and the earlier Exeter manuscript continues to Charles I, whereas the later Trinity text closes with Henry VI.
- 38.
Feingold 1997, 293.
- 39.
For some remarks on the rise of the college lecturer, see Poole 2018.
References
Manuscripts
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Add. A 65. Humphrey Hody, Systema Logicæ, 1677.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Cherry 46 and 47. Francis Cherry, a Latin system of logic, 1683.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. E. 2312. Edward Filmer, curricular cribs, 1700.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Marshall 14. ‘Principia Geometriae’, 1600.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawl. D 262. Oxford philosophical exercises, ca. 1690.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawl. D 1442. Charles King, commonplace book, 1681.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Raw. D. 1082. Humphrey Hody, lectures on logic, 1683.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawl. D. 1121. Humphrey Hody, curricular cribs, 1676.
Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Top. Oxon e. 287. Thomas Dickenson, Quaestiones Theologicae, 1690.
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Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O. 3. 24, pp. 1–35. Curricular cribs and ‘A compendium leading to prophane History’, from John Prideaux.
University College, Oxford, MS 111. Systema logicum, ca. late seventeenth century.
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Poole, W. (2023). Learning by Crib: Some Seventeenth-Century Oxford ‘Systems’. In: Roos, A.M., Manning, G. (eds) Collected Wisdom of the Early Modern Scholar. Archimedes, vol 64. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09722-5_5
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