The most vivid glimpse of John Milton as an undergraduate at Christ's College Cambridge is provided by John Aubrey in his Brief Lives. According to Aubrey, Milton ‘was a very hard student in the University, and performed all his exercises there with very good applause’. But he also seems to have cut a dashing figure among his contemporaries. ‘His harmonicall and ingeniose soul’, Aubrey goes on, ‘did lodge in a beautifull and well-proportioned body’, the most notable features of which were his ‘exceeding faire’ complexion and his ‘abroun hayre’. Aubrey adds in a much-quoted aside that Milton's complexion ‘was so faire that they called him the lady of Christ's College.’

John Milton was admitted as a member of Christ's College on 12 February 1625 and studied there for the next seven years, taking his BA degree in 1628 and graduating as Master of Arts in 1632. What was the University like at that time? What sort of life would Milton have led as a student? What were the academic exercises he performed to such good applause? These are not easy questions to answer with any precision, but the task is greatly eased by the existence of two exceptionally illuminating sets of documents. First there is the Biographical Register of Christ's College compiled by the philologist John Peile, who served as Master of the College between 1887 and 1910. This source has been little exploited for the period I am discussing, but it is possible to glean from it a mass of information about the changing size and social composition of the College in its formative years. Still more enlightening is the series of account books kept by Joseph Mede, a Fellow of the College who must have been well-known to the young John Milton, given that Mede served as one of the College tutors from 1613 until his death in 1638. Mede itemised virtually every expense his pupils incurred, making it possible not merely to piece together a detailed portrait of their daily lives, but also to determine exactly what was being taught at Christ's while Milton was studying there.