Corpus Christi College, Oxford, is 500 years old in March 2017. This book is the first history of the College in over a century and covers the full chronological range from its foundation by Richard Fox in pre-Reformation Oxford to the present day. Corpus Christi was founded with self-consciously high intellectual ambitions in the Renaissance and, although it has sustained those ambitions better at some periods than at others, its intellectual pedigree has remained a constructive challenge throughout its history. Many of the great changes of English history from the sixteenth century onwards—the Reformation, the Civil War, the Glorious Revolution—have had their repercussions and sometimes their participants within the College. The book weaves the history of the College together with the strands of internal domestic history, intellectual history, and the political and religious history of England and Europe.
