Oxford Figures, Chapter 1: 800 years of mathematical traditions

The antiquarian tradition

Later ages would look back and see the early fourteenth century as a pinnacle of scholarly achievement. The predominance of Oxford thought in medieval scholarship is particularly evident from the studies of the sixteenth-century textbook writer Robert Record, himself an Oxford graduate and a Fellow of All Souls College. Record's interest in, and careful reading of, the manuscripts of his predecessors exemplify another tradition of Oxford scholarship. A passage from The castle of knowledge (1556) illustrates Record's understanding of the nation's mathematical past. In the course of a survey of earlier cosmographical writings, he remarks:

Dyvers Englyshe menne have written right well in that argument: as Grostehed, Michell Scotte, Batecombe, Baconthorpe and other dyvers, but fewe of their bookes are printed as yet ...

At least three of these names are of Oxford figures. We have already met Grostehed--that is, Grosseteste (Old French for `big head'). The Carmelite scholar John Baconthorpe, who is supposed to have been the great-nephew of Roger Bacon, was educated at Oxford and Paris, and taught at Oxford in the early fourteenth century. Although his teachings were mostly theological, he wrote a treatise on astronomy which Record seems to have known something about. The third name mentioned by Record, William Batecombe, is believed to have studied at Oxford and taught mathematics, but little is known about him other than that a manuscript ascribed to him was in Robert Record's library. There is no good evidence that the fourth name mentioned by Record, the early thirteenth-century translator Michael Scot, was associated with Oxford, although some manuscripts of his work are in the Bodleian Library. Nevertheless, the fact that three of the four names cited by Record and stretched over three centuries were of Oxford mathematical writers is a small pointer to the supremacy of Oxford in English mathematical life in the medieval period.

When in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mathematicians and other scholars looked back towards a distant golden age of British learning, it was the reputation of Oxford scholars that came to mind, particularly those working in the century from Grosseteste to Bradwardine. The very activity of seeking to preserve and reinterpret the records of the past is itself a feature of academic life in which Oxford has played a major role, both in respect of its own past and that of the various disciplines which have been cultivated at the University; this was particularly evident during the seventeenth century. The national cataclysms of those times--notably the dissolution of the monasteries a hundred years before, and widespread unrest during the Civil War in which Oxford took the losing, Royalist, side--produced among scholars an acute sense of the vulnerability of documents and the need to preserve and treasure them.

Thomas Allen was such a scholar. One of the most influential of Oxford figures from the 1560s until his death in 1632, he began collecting manuscripts at a time when the monasteries had but recently been dispersed, and when some Oxford colleges were replacing their older manuscript collections with printed books. It is in great measure due to Allen that the Bodleian Library, itself a product of these years, has one of the largest collections of manuscripts reflecting English monastic learning, including an exceptional record of medieval mathematics and science. His successors, such as the antiquaries John Aubrey and Anthony a` Wood, continued to show a deep and vigilant concern for the fate of manuscripts as they preserved records and testimony of all kinds (and levels of reliability) to ensure that knowledge about their contemporaries, as well as scholars of earlier generations, was not lost. It is thanks to Aubrey and Wood that we have such detailed accounts of many mathematicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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