University of Vice: Drink, Gentility, and Masculinity in Oxford, Cambridge, and London

Abstract

The early modern universities of Oxford and Cambridge might be imagined as hermetically sealed bastions of learning and piety, because of their historical role as training grounds for clergy. However, this pastoral image runs aground on the fact that scholars actively participated in urban pastimes—and with growing populations, notable increases in building activity, active city councils, and thriving craft guilds, as well as crime and poverty, late sixteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge certainly offered an urban experience, if on a smaller scale than that of London.¹ Noting the regularity with which historians separate the university from its urban environs, Victor Morgan argues that the two should be examined in relation to each other and to the larger spheres of which they are a part:

There is, perhaps, a temptation to conceive the relationship between a university and its urban context simply as bipartite…. I suspect that the relationship is rarely as simple as this. To borrow a phrase of the anthropologists, universities and their urban environs are almost always “part societies,” and the relationship between these two particular constituent elements can only be fully understood within the larger context.²