Thomas Charles-Edwards – författare

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.

The period from the departure of the Romans through to the coming of the Vikings saw the gradual conversion of the peoples of the British Isles to Christianity and (with the exception of Ireland) the redrawing of the ethnic and political map of the islands. The chapters in this volume analyse in turn the different nationalities and kingdoms that existed in the British Isles during this period, the process of their conversion to Christianity, the development of art and of a written culture and the interaction between this written culture and the societies of the day. Moving away from the pattern of histories constructed on the basis of later nation states, this volume takes Britain and Ireland as a whole, so as to understand them better as they were at the time and avoid anachronistic divisions from a later era. It is an approach that allows the volume to give greater weight to the important religious, intellectual and artistic developments and interactions of the period, which normally crossed national boundaries at this time.

The period from the departure of the Romans through to the coming of the Vikings saw the gradual conversion of the peoples of the British Isles to Christianity and (with the exception of Ireland) the redrawing of the ethnic and political map of the islands. The chapters in this volume, each written by a leading scholar of the period, analyse in turn the different nationalities and kingdoms that existed in the British Isles during this period, the process of their conversion to Christianity, the development of art and of a written culture, and the interaction between this written culture and the societies of the day. The first scholarly account to move away from the pattern of histories constructed on the basis of later nation states, this volume takes Britain and Ireland as a whole, so as to understand them better as they were at the time and avoid anachronistic divisions from a later era. It is an approach that allows the volume to give greater weight to the important religious, intellectual, and artistic developments and interactions of the period, which normally crossed national boundaries.