Founders and Fellowship. The Early History of Exeter College, Oxford 1314-1592

摘要

Exeter College should count itself fortunate to have been able to persuade such an appropriate author as John Maddicott FBA to write this book. He is a distinguished scholar of the political and social history of mediaeval England, has been a Fellow of Exeter (now Emeritus) since 1969, and was born in the Exeter Registration District of Devon, the College's hinterland for the whole of the period he surveys. There was even, which must have made him smile, a John Mattecote (= Maddicott) who was a Fellow of Exeter about 1376-1386. Given that it is such an unusual and regional surname (there were only 66 Maddicott souls in the entire 1911 census of all England & Wales, 51 of them born in Devon), we can be certain that the fourteenth century Fellow of Exeter John Mattecote belongs to the present author's family tree. Maddicott brings to his book a deep knowledge not only of his immediate subject, but also of its wider context, and the result is a scholarly tour de force which is also fluent and readable, with no parochial taint. Modern college histories have tried to avoid parochialism, but it is not easy to combine what a Development Office would like to see with sound detached scholarship. Exeter alumni are no doubt relishing this book already, but anyone anywhere interested in the history of mediaeval scholarship should read it, and will benefit from doing so.