Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at Historyofilosophy.net.

Today's episode, I'll teach you differences, British Scholasticism.

Here's my favorite anecdote about Oxford University.

In the middle of the 19th century, so the story goes, the beams in the roof of the new college dining hall needed to be replaced.

The fellows of the college asked the Forester whether he could help.

He replied, we were wondering when you'd ask and explained that a grove of trees had been planted 500 years earlier and protected by generations of foresters for exactly this purpose.

Though it seems that this story isn't entirely accurate, it does convey a deeper truth about Oxford.

As one of Europe's oldest universities, it is distinguished by tradition and very long-term planning.

It is a place where change tends to happen slowly.

When things have been done in a certain way for the last several centuries, why start doing things differently now?

Yet as far back as the 16th century, the fellows of Oxford did start to do things differently, very differently.

In fact, even this already long-lived institution could not remain untouched by the intellectual and spiritual upheavals of the Renaissance and Reformation.

Some of the changes were at the institutional level.

The establishment of grammar schools meant the universities were not the only place where the young could study.

Thanks to this development and the rise of Protestantism with its focus on reading scripture for oneself, literacy became more widespread, at least among boys and men.

The period also saw the emergence of other institutions of higher education.

Notably, the Inns of Court in London, which had existed for some time, became an important center of legal study and general education in the 15th and 16th centuries.

At the old universities, meanwhile, students increasingly took instruction directly from masters in an early version of the tutorial system that is, of course, still in use at Oxford and Cambridge to this day.

They might even live in the homes of their tutors.

Elite students would hire their tutors directly, often satisfying themselves with gaining general reading and mathematical skills without bothering to finish off their degree.

Poros students kept the wolf from the door by working as servants for their well-born classmates, as we saw Edmund Spencer doing.

And then there were the changes to the teaching curriculum.

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