Book Review by Natalie Latteri on J. Mordaunt Crook\u27s Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College, originally published on H-Education (October, 2012) and commissioned by Jonathan Anuik
https://networks.h-net.org/node/14281/reviews/16258/latteri-crook-brasenose-biography-oxford-colleg

Latteri, Natalie

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University of San Francisco

The University of San Francisco USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center Theology & Religious Studies College of Arts and Sciences 10-2012 Latteri on Crook, 'Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College' Natalie Latteri Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.usfca.edu/thrs H-Education    Citation: H-Net Reviews. Latteri on Crook, 'Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College'. H-Education. 03-20-2014.https://networks.h-net.org/node/14281/reviews/16258/latteri-crook-brasenose-biography-oxford-collegeLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.1Latteri on Crook, 'Brasenose: The Biography of an OxfordCollege'Review published on Tuesday, October 2, 2012J. Mordaunt Crook.  Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College.  Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2008. xvi + 555 pp. $165.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-954486-8.Reviewed by  Natalie E. Latteri (Purdue University) Published on  H-Education (October, 2012)Commissioned by Jonathan AnuikLatteri on CrookWith his  biographical  narrative Brasenose,  J.  Mordaunt  Crook joins  an esteemed community  ofscholars able to eloquently situate the intellectual, cultural, and political trends of a remarkableinstitution of higher learning within the broader Oxford, British, and global context. He provides asuccinct  account  of  pertinent  policies  informed  by  the  interests  of  founders  and  leadingadministrators from Brasenose’s collegiate origins in the sixteenth century through the early years ofthe twenty-first century. As has come to be expected of monographs spanning a half-millennium,Crook organizes his text into lengthy chapters that canvass decreasing increments of time throughthe modern era, presumably due as much to the availability of sources as to the quicker pace ofinnovation in the last two centuries. Throughout the text his approach is holistic. In contrast to theinstitutional biographies that are burdened by an excess of information regarding administrators’personal lives and public policies, Crook laudably emphasizes the cohesive dynamic of academicinstitutions affected by and effecting change.Chapter  1  discusses  Brasenose’s  architectural  elements  and its  first  incarnation as  a  students’lodging in 1313, its emergence as a hall by 1381, and finally, its position as an esteemed college atOxford by 1509. Crook’s primary focus of the chapter, however, lies in tracing Brasenose’s 1509founding by William Smith (bishop) and Richard Sutton (lawyer) under the reign of Henry VIII,through 1688, the year of James II’s exile and the landing of William of Orange at Torbay. Here,Crook presents the political, cultural, and pedagogical views of collegiate authorities and a samplingof students to support his contention that Brasenose served as a microcosm of England at large.This period of flux, initiated by the religio-political climate of the Henrician Reformation and carriedon by the later Tudor and Stewart monarchs up to the Glorious Revolution, has been viewed byrevisionist historians, such as Robert Whiting, as one of tepid conformity rather than conviction.[1]To an extent, Crook agrees. He shows that both the Catholic piety and the scholasticism of medievalEngland only gradually gave way to humanism and the predominance of English Protestantism in thecourse of the sixteenth century due to increasingly severe initiatives of the ruling elite, and that thecountry and its institutions were reluctant to return to Catholicism yet again in the wake of theEnglish civil wars of the seventeenth century, especially under a weak monarch. According to Crook,this zeitgeist was reflected in the curriculum and in the composition of Brasenose’s student body. Thetype of  pupil  shifted in the sixteenth century from aspiring clerics mostly from Lancashire andCheshire to those hoping to prove themselves in the professions, as well as the occasional member ofH-Education    Citation: H-Net Reviews. Latteri on Crook, 'Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College'. H-Education. 03-20-2014.https://networks.h-net.org/node/14281/reviews/16258/latteri-crook-brasenose-biography-oxford-collegeLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.2the gentry. The college bore the emergence of the tutorial system to accommodate this new model.To Brasenose’s credit, and in an attempt to present the college as a true microcosm of early modernEngland, Crook also highlights the college’s most notable Puritan and Catholic alumni who becameprolific writers and infamous politicos, such as John Foxe and possibly even William Shakespeare.They influenced the masses on either side of the religio-political divide as much as their peers meldedinto  the  general  English  populace.  Crook  indicates  that  during  the  reign  of  James  II,  though,Brasenose remained sympathetic to Catholicism and that the college served as a predominantlyJacobite community--one loyal to the deposed monarch--throughout the majority of the seventeenthcentury. It accepted the terms of the Revolution Settlement, which mandated Protestant successionto the exclusion of Catholic claimants to the throne (not to mention any other outlying groups), onlywhen the Hanoverian dynasty rose to dominance in the early eighteenth century.Chapter  2  concentrates  on  socioeconomic  rather  than religio-political  matters.  Its  focus  lies  indescribing Brasenose’s escalating position from a middling Oxford college of limited means to thehub of Oxford life, chronicled in bills of sale that pepper the chapter. This shift, according to Crook,resulted predominantly from the erection of Radcliffe Square and Camera (1749), geographicallysituated at Oxford’s center. The fortunate positioning served to increase the student body, rent, andstatus of Brasenose; and the ever-rising importance of the wealthy commoner helped to fill  thecollege’s coffers even without the number of gentry attending other Oxford colleges. By the thirdquarter of the eighteenth century, Brasenose was fashionable.The brief span of thirty-seven years and three surnames mark the subject of the next chapter. From1785 to 1822, Principal William Cleaver, Principal Frodsham Hodson, and the Brasenose dynasticfamily, the Hebers, dominated the college. The first helped to double Brasenose’s rising annualrevenue; the second reformed pedagogy yet again to meet more strenuous standards of scholarlywork in the modern era; and the Hebers cemented the college’s position in politics through theirgentry standing. Chapter 4 similarly covers a brief period in Brasenose’s history, the thirty-one yearsbetween 1822 and 1853, yet it returns to the role of religion and reform in the college. Here, Crookexplains the effects of sectarian divisions among Tractarians--a group who vied for the inclusion ofCatholic ritual within the Anglican liturgy, also known as Anglo-Catholics--and those Anglicans whorejected Catholicism as well as further pedagogical reform. He focuses on the replacement of Latinwith English account books and the new tiered level of degrees, which included those students who(barely) passed their exams. This latter reform resulted in what Crook describes as increasinglyformulaic lectures for undergraduates and a new syllabus system void of the older emphasis onChristian religion.Chapters 5 and 6 broach the topics of criticism and athleticism at Brasenose as well as the increasinginclusion of students suited for the British military and gentry, respectively, during the span of 1853through 1918. The former holds the years 1853 through 1886 as an age of notable athletes andcritiques. While it is dominated by a discussion of the figures Walter Pater, Brasenose fellow andnoted essayist and art and literature critic, and Edward Hartopp Cradock, Brasenose fellow andeventual principal, this chapter significantly illustrates the importance of sport--particularly rowingand cricket--and scholarly work as unifying agents of collective identity at Brasenose. The latterchapter commences with an in-depth treatment of the architectural advances made to the college inthe late-nineteenth century by Thomas Graham Jackson before presenting what reads as a collectionH-Education    Citation: H-Net Reviews. Latteri on Crook, 'Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College'. H-Education. 03-20-2014.https://networks.h-net.org/node/14281/reviews/16258/latteri-crook-brasenose-biography-oxford-collegeLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.3of mini-biographies of Brasenose gentlemen who enjoyed the aforesaid improvements and who wouldlater serve in the British military during the First World War, when little attention was paid to eitheraesthetics or athletics.Chapter 7 is, by far, the most interesting in Crook’s monograph as it deals with three significantchanges occurring between 1919 and 1920: the acceptance of funding from the British government; afarewell to the stuffy Greek language requirement; and the admission and conferral of degrees towomen; Crook maintains that the first change of these three changes was enacted as a result of thewidespread financial and scientific need resulting from the First World War. Though society waslargely bankrupt, the need for technological advancement was pressing. The latter two had beendiscussed since the Victorian era and finally actualized due to external and internal pressures to openOxford up to merit beyond the confines of sex and antiquarian impracticality.  The final chapter covers the period from 1948 through the first decade of the second millennium andreveals  the  continued  struggle  for  the  achievement  of  democratization  that  was  begun by  theprevious generations. Crook shows that Oxford in general and Brasenose in particular were grapplingwith very real questions at this time: “Would it ever be possible to universalize privilege; to reconcileequality and talent? Were the higher forms of civility ... ultimately compatible with the democraticimpulse?” (p. 385). For Crook, the answer to the latter is an unequivocal yes. Brasenose made--andcontinues  to  make--a  valiant  effort  to  find  an  equitable  center  ground  in  which  potential  isrecognized, and merit rewarded, in students from around the world.  Crook’s Brasenose  was a pleasure to read. His ability to engagingly narrate a five-hundred-yearOxford biography is truly admirable and not likely to be duplicated anytime soon. The broad range ofsources employed--from architectural remains to charters, memoirs, photographs, and letters--lendthemselves to a most inclusive history, which effectively weaves together the religious, political,economic, social, and cultural composition of Brasenose College. One can only hope that Crook’scohesive approach will not only be imitated, but also serve to supplant the long tradition in historiesof  British universities  in which pedagogy,  architecture,  and tolerance,  to name a few topics ofexploration, are discussed with little recognition of context.Note[1]. Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=36320Citation: Natalie E. Latteri. Review of Crook, J. Mordaunt, Brasenose: The Biography of an OxfordC o l l e g e .  H - E d u c a t i o n ,  H - N e t  R e v i e w s .  O c t o b e r ,  2 0 1 2 .  U R L :http:/ /www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36320This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0United States License.

Latteri on Crook, \u27Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College\u27

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Latteri on Crook, \u27Brasenose: The Biography of an Oxford College\u27

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