The Cambridge Apostles 1820 1914

This book offers a highly engaging history of the world's most famous secret society, the Cambridge 'Apostles', based upon the lives, careers and correspondence of the 255 Apostles elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society between 1820 and 1914. It examines the way in which the Apostles recruited their membership, the Society's discussions and its intellectual preoccupations. From its pages emerge such figures as F. D. Maurice, John Sterling, John Mitchell Kemble, Richard Trench, Fenton Hort, James Clerk Maxwell, Henry Sidgwick, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. The careers of these and many other leading Apostles are traced, through parliament, government, letters, and in public school and university reform. The book also makes an important contribution in discussing the role of liberalism, imagination and friendship at the intersection of the life of learning and public life. This is a major contribution to the intellectual and social history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the history of the University of Cambridge. It demonstrates in impressive depth just how and why the Apostles forged original themes in modern intellectual life.

Public life in Great Britain underwent a major transformation after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and the passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, which eliminated the requirement that men in public positions swear to uphold the doctrines of the Anglican Church. According to Lubenow (Stockton College), these legislative changes initiated a fundamental reallocation of power, opening many careers to men of talent and educational qualifications, including those whose perspectives and intellectual dispositions led them to question the validity of uniform religious dogma. Lubenow identifies members of the Benson, Strachey, Balfour, Lyttelton, and Sitwell families among the "Men of Letters" who epitomized the 19th century's new secular meritocracy, noting that when religious uniformity was removed as a requirement for positions in the public sphere, religion became more important, if more fluid, in the lives of such Britons. Thus, men of intellectual merit, rather than only those from the more conservative landowning or military traditions, were able to rise in politics, civil service, the clergy, the professions, and the universities, taking their liberal values regarding liberty, moral cultivation, and philosophy into the wider public sphere. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty. Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty. Reviewed by E. J. Jenkins.

Many books have been written about nineteenth-century Oxford theology, but what was happening in Cambridge? This book provides the first continuous account of what might be called 'the Cambridge theological tradition', by discussing its leading figures from Richard Watson and William Paley, through Herbert Marsh and Julius Hare, to the trio of Lightfoot, Westcott and Hort. It also includes a chapter on nonconformists such as Robertson Smith, P.T. Forsyth and T.R. Glover. The analysis is organised around the defences that were offered for the credibility of Christianity in response to hostile and friendly critics. In this period the study of theology was not yet divided into its modern self-contained areas. A critical approach to scripture was taken for granted, and its implications for ecclesiology, the understanding of salvation and the social implications of the Gospel were teased out (in Hort's phrase) through enquiry and controversy as a way to discover truth. Cambridge both engaged with German theology and responded positively to the nineteenth-century 'crisis of faith'.

Using archival material and many unpublished sources, this work traces the origins of Oxford and Cambridge University colleges as places of learning, founded from the thirteenth century, for unmarried men who were required to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the majority of whom trained for the priesthood. The process reveals how the isolated monk-like existence was gradually transformed from the idea of married Fellows at University Colleges being considered absurd into considering it absurd not to allow Fellows to marry and keep their fellowships and therefore their income. This book shows how the Church was accepted as an essential element in society with university trained Churchmen becoming influential in Crown, government, and State. As part of the cataclysmic change from Catholic to Protestant religion, Edward VI and his Council permitted priests to marry, partly to declare their allegiance to the new Protestant religion and their rejection of the old. However, within the university colleges the rule that Fellows would lose their fellowships immediately on marriage was insisted upon. Why a group of individuals were instructed to remain set in a medieval monastic way of life within a nineteenth-century institution is traced in conjunction with how anomalies arose, were absorbed, accepted or challenged by a few courageous individuals prior to bringing about the ultimate change to the statutes in 1882.

Based on the remarkable true story of G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan, and populated with such luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Indian Clerk takes this extraordinary slice of history and transforms it into an emotional and spellbinding story about the fragility of human connection and our need to find order in the world. A literary masterpiece, it appeared on four bestseller lists, including the Los Angeles Times, and received dazzling reviews from every major publication in the country.

Drawing upon a wide range of source material, this study reassesses the idea that the Romantic defence of spiritual and humanistic culture developed as a reaction to the perceived individualistic, philistine values of the science of political economy.

Provides a comprehensive guide to the storied Bloomsbury Group, a social circle of prominent intellectuals active during the interwar period.