Yearly, I get sent The Record of Hertford College. I often have a quick look through, although the college is not really, nowadays, quite my Cup of Tea. (I rather wish that, sixty five years ago, I had written "J W Hunwicke Aulae Cervinae" rather than "Hertford College" inside my own books.)
In the recent edition, I found a piece by a Christopher Tyerman about the Library. Frustratingly, it begins with a photograph of the Benefactors' Book ... but taken at a curious slant so that one cannot actually read it. I can, however, discern the words "Calvini Institutiones".
Aha.
A few pages further on, there is this in Tyerman's text: "A succession of able and distinguished scholars and tutors entrenched the hall's reputation as one of the leading puritan houses in the university. ... After the headwinds of the hostile environment to Calvinist thought and practices engineered by the busy-body Chancellorship of Archbishop Laud in the 1630s, and the near collapse of numbers and expulsion of Wilkinson and his tutors during the Royalist occupation of Oxford in 1645-6, the Parliamentary triumph of 1646 restored the Calvinist regime ...". This looks to me ... well, strangely sympathetic to Calvinism.
I wonder why we need to have this aged heresy thrust into our faces. The current Principal has a toothy smile which doesn't look Calvinist. Somehow, I doubt whether the current Fellowship are all fanatical Genevans. And when you hear the youff gossipping in the street, the burden of their exchanges rarely seems to be about the necessity of Predestination, single, double, or triple.
And among the the Chapel Preachers engagaged by the Chaplain (she is one of the Monstrous Regiment of Women) is a 'Transgender Outreach Worker'.
I wonder where that comes in the Institutiones.
4 comments:
Well, it's just an excuse to have a pop at Laud and the royalists, isn't it? They haven't the faintest notion of what Calvinism really is - it'd horrify them if they did - just that the 'wrong' people opposed it.
The other place is no better, naturally. The splendid Van Dyke portrait of Laud in the Fitzwilliam had (has?) a ripe piece of folly in its interpretative panel. In their clamour to calumniate Laud, they trip over themselves. Suggesting that the depiction of his fingers identifies him as a voluptuary, they label them 'plump and venial' (sic). Silly Fitzbilly.
Here in the US, Calvinism is still alive and well for some people. Lots of debates (usually against Catholics), lots of streaming of talks.
I don't know if it is still alive in Oxford.
The website of the Fitzwilliam says that Van Dyck used that pose for Laud to denote integrity.
Here in the U.S., thanks to Calvinist influence, we still think it a great idea to vote on the truth in religious matters. Very pre-Synodal.
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