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A Cambridge Prevarication in the Earlier Seventeenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Extract
The Odd corners of scholarship, so very often dusty and unrewarding to the researcher, occasionally provide a forgotten knickknack which completes the décor of a period room. Seventeenth-century scholasticism is for most of us a period room, whose pieces such as triposes, disputations, declamations, quadragesimals, clerums, and so on, we find too uncomfortable for our twentieth-century use and perhaps a bit too ugly for our ranch-style academic taste. To brighten the room a bit, even for themselves, the seventeenth-century Cambridge scholastics made use of a harmless piece of bric-a-brac called the prevarication or varier's speech. It is a tragedy that most of these are now lost, for with proper evaluation a history of seventeenth-century thought might almost be written from them alone.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1955
References
1 Peacock, George, Observations on the Statutes of… Cambridge (Cambridge, 1841)Google Scholar, App. B. lxxxii.
2 The burlesquing of disputation theses at Cambridge is probably the exemplar of the Mock Theses which appear at Harvard in 1663. The uniqueness of the Harvard set of Mock Theses has eluded explanation. We suggest that other sets for Harvard commencements were drawn up, but, like Cambridge prevarications, were considered fugitive and not worth preserving. See Morison, Samuel Eliot, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), II, 596–599 Google Scholar. The mock-serious tradition is still part of undergraduate humor at Harvard, as everywhere, e.g., Robert Benchley's ‘Ivy Oration', printed in The Harvard Advocate Anthology (New York, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1950), pp. 128-134. The Harvard Lampoon is, of course, in the best tradition.
3 Clarke, Samuel, A Collection of the Lives of Ten Eminent Divines (London, 1662), p. 96 Google Scholar.
4 Statuta Aeademiae Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge, 1785), p. 336.
5 University Library, Cambridge, Ms Dd. 6. 30.
6 Gonville and Caius College Library, Cambridge, MS 627-250; printed in Wordsworth, Christopher, Scholae Academicae (Cambridge, 1877), p. 274 Google Scholar.
7 Ibid.
8 The identity of this Fuller is a matter of some dispute. Though the verses bear a notation in the copyist's hand, ‘of Sydn. Coll. Cantab.’, which would make them the work of Thomas Fuller the historian, J. E. Bailey does not think they belong to the author of The Worthies of England. He feels that they belong to Thomas Fuller of Christ's, that the ascription to Fuller of Sidney Sussex is a copyist's mistake. For a discussion of the matter, see Bailey, J. E., The Life of Thomas Fuller, D.D. (London, 1874), pp. 465–467 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Prof. James O. Wood for calling my attention to Bailey's opinion in the matter.
9 Seventeenth Century News, XIII (Summer 1955), 27, 11. 3-6.
10 Statuta Academiae Cantabrigiensis, pp. 137-138.
11 Plus Ultra (London, 1668), p. 118.
12 Heliconem vocare/Mortuum mare/Non dubitarem / … Amasia[m] fingere/Ad nullam attingere/…’ (ll. 12-23).
13 We construe ll. 29-31: ‘semper retinere amplexus in presentem amicam circumferentem [amplexus in me].'
14 ‘Stillantibus rebus/Donee salvatur/Et bene molliatur/Rorisinstar in herbis/…’ (ll. 32-35).
15 Est mihi domi/Filia promi/Philosophia naturalis/[Haec] e realis.’ (ll. 38-41) Filia promi is either ‘daughter of the butler’ (promus, -i) or ‘daughter of the pantry’ (promum, -i).
16 Metaphysica, XI, 4, 1061 b, 6
17 P. L. x. 891-892. See also VIII. 540-546, which might be straight from Keckermarm's treatise on women.
18 (Hanover, 1623), p. 596.
19 ‘Virginem dotatam/Et glebem sequestratam/Simul comparare / Argenteos fontes/ In mappa possessionis/Et retentions/Conglomerare/Mathematica e vera/Et plusquam chimaera.’ (ll. 46-55).
20 The Works of Thomas Hearne, (London, 1810), Vol. III, Containing the first volume of Peter Langtqft's Chronicle, preface, cxlvii.
21 Ibid, III, cxlviii.
22 Pope, Walter, The Life of… Seth [Ward] (London, 1697), p. 10 Google Scholar.
23 The Works of Thomas Heame, III, cxlviii.
24 The English universities were not the only source of seventeenth-century ‘prevarications’. To be included in the sub-genre were the pasquinades which were posted in the streets of Rome during the famous Jesuit-Dominican disputations De Auxiliis (1602). James Brodrick, s.J., quotes from one of these pasquinades in his Robert Bellarmine (London, 1928), II, 55, n. 2.