Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Professors of Divinity at Cambridge: 1502 to 1649

by Patrick Collinson, Richard Rex, Graham Stanton

Three leading scholars examine one of the oldest professorships, the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Graham Stanton, current holder, writes an introduction considering theology at Cambridge before 1502 and after 1649. In two subsequent chapters (delivered as lectures at an event in March 2002 to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Chair), Richard Rex offers an account of the establishment of the Professorship in 1502 and Patrick Collinson addresses the extent to which early incumbents were involved in the religious and political turmoil of the era.

104 pages, Paperback

First published September 8, 2003

About the author

Professor Patrick Collinson was a distinguished and much published author in the field of early modern history. A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1988, he was Regius Professor of History at the University until 1996. He also held a number of academic distinctions, including Fellowship of the British Academy.

Collinson authored his 1957 doctorate on Elizabethan Puritanism under J. E. Neale, and was a lecturer at the University of Khartoum and King's College London. He was professor at the University of Sydney in 1969, then at the University of Kent at Canterbury and the University of Sheffield. His 1967 monograph, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, had a great impact on historians' understanding of the movement. The work showed Puritanism to be a significant force within the Elizabethan Church instead of merely a radical group of individuals. By the time of his retirement in 1996, he was one of the doyens of English Reformation history. His short summation of the period, The Reformation, was published in 2003.
Collinson's work laid the foundations, in many ways, for what historians of the English Reformation currently term the 'Calvinist Consensus' in the latter decades of the sixteenth and reign of James I/VI. As such, the belief Puritanism was anything but religiously radical in relation to English, and indeed British, culture stands as one of his great achievements as an historian.