The University of Oxford is the third oldest university in Europe and remains one of the greatest universities in the world. How did such an ancient institution flourish through the ages? This book offers a succinct illustrated account of its colourful and controversial 800-year history, from medieval times through the Reformation and on to the nineteenth century, in which the foundations of the modern tutorial system were laid. It describes the extraordinary and influential people who shaped the development of the institution and helped to create today's world-class research university. Institutions have waxed and waned over the centuries but Oxford has always succeeded in reinventing itself to meet the demands of a new age. Richly illustrated with archival material, prints and portraits, this book explores how a university in a small provincial town rose to become one of the top universities in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The long eighteenth century is often seen as the age ‘when Europe spoke French’. After all, many of the leading figures of the Enlightenment were French and even a good number of authors in other countries chose this language to reach an audience beyond the borders of their homeland. Latin may have served a similar purpose in the Renaissance, but by the eighteenth century its importance quickly declined. This view is simplistic and misleading and this volume seeks to refute it. The essays presented in this book demonstrate Latin continued to play a highly important role during the long eighteenth century, both within Europe and in interactions between the ‘West’ and the rest of the world. It sheds light on the reasons why Latin remained a key factor in eighteenth-century culture, as well as the contexts in which it was used. In so doing, this volume makes a significant contribution to current debates on the nature of the Enlightenment and its place in global history.

Volume IX of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information, which makes this annual publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. The present volume carries a wide range of articles which cover the early history of Europe's universities, as well as their later development. As usual, the authors and contributors are drawn from all parts of the western world, giving the yearbook a decidedly international flavour. Of particular note is the article by the American historian of theology, R. Emmet McLaughlin, on the role of the medieval university in preparing the ground for the Reformation.

Providing the first ever statistical study of a professional cohort in the era of the industrial revolution, this prosopographical study of some 450 surgeons who joined the army medical service during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, charts the background, education, military and civilian career, marriage, sons' occupations, wealth at death, and broader social and cultural interests of the members of the cohort. It reveals the role that could be played by the nascent professions in this period in promoting rapid social mobility. The group of medical practitioners selected for this analysis did not come from affluent or professional families but profited from their years in the army to build up a solid and sometimes spectacular fortune, marry into the professions, and place their sons in professional careers. The study contributes to our understanding of Britishness in the period, since the majority of the cohort came from small-town and rural Scotland and Ireland but seldom found their wives in the native country and frequently settled in London and other English cities, where they often became pillars of the community.

Volume XI of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information which makes this annual publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. It carries a wide range of contributions which cover the early history of Europe's universities as well as their later development. Among the articles are studies of medieval Paris, sixteenth-century Wittenberg, early nineteenth-century Padua and the twentieth-century Hebrew University of Jerusalem. History of Universities is a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.

In the lead-up to the bicentenary of Trafalgar a number of important new studies have been published about the life of Nelson and his defeat of the Combined Fleet in 1805. Despite the significant role played by the health and fitness of the British crews in securing the victory, little has been written hitherto about the naval surgeon in the era of the long war against France. This book is intended to fill the gap. Sir William Beatty (1773-1842) was surgeon of the Victory at Trafalgar. An Ulsterman from Londonderry, he had joined the navy in 1791. Before being warranted to Nelson's flagship, Beatty had served upon ten other warships, and survived a yellow fever epidemic, court martial, and shipwreck to share in the capture of a Spanish treasure ship. After Trafalgar, he became Physician of the Channel Fleet, based at Plymouth, and eventually Physician to Greenwich Hospital, where he served until his retirement in 1838. As the book makes clear in drawing upon an extensive prosopographical database, Beatty's career until 1805 was representative of the experience of the approximately 2,000 naval surgeons who joined the navy in the course of the war.
The first part of the biography provides a detailed and scholarly introduction to the professional education, training, and work of the naval surgeon. But after 1805 Beatty became a member of the service elite, and his career becomes interesting for other reasons. In the final decades of his life, Beatty was far more than a senior naval physician. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, director of the Clerical and Medical Insurance Company, and director of the London to Greenwich Railway, he was a prominent figure in London's business andscientific community, who used his growing wealth to build a large collection of books and manuscripts. His later life is testimony to the much wider contribution that some naval and army medical officers made to the development of the new Britain of the nineteenth century. In Beatty's case, too, the contribution was original. By publishing in 1807 his carefully crafted Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson, he was instrumental in forging the myth of the hero's last hours, which has become a part of the national consciousness and has helped to define for generations the concept of Britishness.

This is a unique and authoritative account of the history of French medicine (1500-1789). Physicians, surgeons and apothecaries are centre-stage, but quacks, charlatans, wise women, midwives, herbalists and others have also been brought into the analysis and their ideas and activities are set within the broader cultural, social and political context.

Volume XII of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information, which makes this annual publication such an indispensable book for the historian of higher education. Its contributions range widely geographically, chronologically, and in subject matter. Volume XII includes articles on medieval collegiate statutes, Renaissance psychology, philosophy in nineteenth century German universities, and women academics in Britain, and is, as always, a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.

Volume X of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information, which makes this annual publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. The articles cover a wide chronological and geographical range. They include studies on the financing of university education in twelfth and thirteenth-century France; the early modern University of Prague; Newman and Tractarian Oxford's idea of a university; and universities and elites in modern Britain. Its combination of original scholarship and comprehensive bibliographical material ensures that History of the Universities, Volume X is both intellectually stimulating and a necessary work of reference.

Since 1988 (Volume VII) there have been two new sections, one devoted to research in progress and the other to an on-going bibliography of recent publications in the history of higher education throughout the world. Michael McVaugh and Luis Garcia Ballester: The Medical Faculty at Early Fourteenth-Century Lerida; Thomas E. Morrissey: The Art of Teaching and Learning Law: a Late Medieval Tract; Mario Rizzo: University, Administration, Taxation, and Society in Italy in the Sixteenth Century: the Case of Fiscal Exemptions for the University of Pavia; G. L. E. Turner: Experimental Science in Early Nineteenth-Century Oxford; Hans-Georg Schneider: The Threat to Authority in the Revolution of Chemistry; Notker Hammerstein: The Modern World, Sciences, Medicine, and Universities.

Despite the significant role played by the health and fitness of the British crews in Nelson's defeat of the Combined Fleet in 1805, little has been written hitherto about the naval surgeon in the era of the long war against France. This book is intended to fill the gap. Sir William Beatty (1773-1842) was surgeon of the Victory at Trafalgar. An Ulsterman from Londonderry, he had joined the navy in 1791. Before being warranted to Nelson's flagship, Beatty had served upon ten other warships, and survived a yellow fever epidemic, court martial, and shipwreck to share in the capture of a Spanish treasure ship. After Trafalgar, he became Physician of the Channel Fleet, based at Plymouth, and eventually Physician to Greenwich Hospital, where he served until his retirement in 1838. As the book makes clear in drawing upon an extensive prosopographical database, Beatty's career until 1805 was representative of the experience of the approximately 2,000 naval surgeons who joined the navy in the course of the war.
The first part of the biography provides a detailed and scholarly introduction to the professional education, training, and work of the naval surgeon. But after 1805 Beatty became a member of the service elite, and his career becomes interesting for other reasons. In the final decades of his life, Beatty was far more than a senior naval physician. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, director of the Clerical and Medical Insurance Company, and director of the London to Greenwich Railway, he was a prominent figure in London's business and scientific community, who used his growing wealth to build a large collection of books and manuscripts. His later life is testimony to the much widercontribution that some naval and army medical officers made to the development of the new Britain of the nineteenth century. In Beatty's case, too, the contribution was original. By publishing in 1807 his carefully crafted Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson, he was instrumental in forging the myth of the hero's last hours, which has become a part of the national consciousness and has helped to define for generations the concept of Britishness.

This study of Cardinal Richelieu's career as chief minister to Louis XIII of France presents the original research of eight experts in the field. Linking their work is the belief that Richelieu's ministry was a significant moment in the history of early modern France. The authors reject the traditional picture of Richelieu as the single-handed creator of the French absolute state and the original exponent of Realpolitik. Instead they paint a collective portrait of a statesman politically astute but none the less devout. The Richelieu who emerges is in many respects a conservative figure, but one driven by a genuine desire to establish a more just and peaceful society (both in France and in Europe). The emphasis here, then, is more on Richelieu the Cardinal than on Richelieu the secular statesman. The tragedy and irony of his ministry, as the authors also show, was that to maintain himself in power, Richelieu had to behave more like a Renaissance prince than a Counter-Reformation prelate.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was recognized as Britain's most distinguished historian of ideas. Many of his essays discussed thinkers of what this book calls the 'long Enlightenment' (from Vico in the eighteenth century to Marx and Mill in the nineteenth, with Machiavelli as a precursor). Yet he is particularly associated with the concept of the 'Counter-Enlightenment', comprising those thinkers (Herder, Hamann, and even Kant) who in Berlin's view reacted against the Enlightenment's naive rationalism, scientism and progressivism, its assumption that human beings were basically homogeneous and could be rendered happy by the remorseless application of scientific reason. Berlin's 'Counter-Enlightenment' has received critical attention, but no-one has yet analysed the understanding of the Enlightenment on which it rests. Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment explores the development of Berlin's conception of the Enlightenment, noting its curious narrowness, its ambivalence, and its indebtedness to a specific German intellectual tradition. Contributors to the book examine his comments on individual writers, showing how they were inflected by his questionable assumptions, and arguing that some of the writers he assigned to the 'Counter-Enlightenment' have closer affinities to the Enlightenment than he recognized. By locating Berlin in the history of Enlightenment studies, this book also makes a contribution to defining the historical place of his work and to evaluating his intellectual legacy.

The seventh volume of this annual publication consists primarily of eleven articles devoted to the period 1760-1848. The papers range from the study of particular faculties to the role of government in higher education and the concept of a liberal education. Together, the articles form a unique account of the development of the university in the age of the liberal revolution in countries as distinct as Russia, France, and the United States. As well as containing the usual wide selection of book reviews devoted to recent works on university history, this volume also contains two new sections, one devoted to research in progress, and the other to an on-going bibliography of recent publications (articles and books) in the field of the history of higher education throughout the world. With these additions, Volume VII is much larger than its predecessors, confirming History of Universities as an indispensable tool for every student of the history of education.