Library Catalogues and Tudor Oxford and Cambridge

In the introduction to his valuable aid to research, Library Catalogues of the English Renaissance, Sears Jayne makes some helpful suggestions about how the evidence whose whereabouts he has discovered and revealed to us may enlarge our knowledge and improve our understanding of the English Renaissance. In one respect, however, he fails to do full justice to the potentialities of the sources he has opened up. For some reason, he permits an old myth about Tudor Oxford and Cambridge to color his opinion of what the lists of books contained in inventories of the personal effects of university students who died while they were in residence at Oxford and Cambridge prove about the character and intellectual life of the two institutions. He states categorically in one place that ‘the catalogues reflect beautifully the contrast between conservative, scholastic Oxford and reforming, humanist Cambridge’.