Corpus Before Erasmus, or the English Humanist Tradition and Greek Before the Trojans

Abstract

This chapter looks at aspects of identity and emotion in life at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as envisaged by its founder and as experienced in its early decades. Many historians now strive to discern emotions from the past and to understand the lives of their subjects as experienced in bodies and with feeling. To study emotions is to understand what inspired fear, love, anger, or anxiety, while acknowledging that both the triggers for these emotions and the ways they were expressed are historical indeed. Thinking of Corpus Christi, such embodied experiences happened at its dining tables, in its chapel and library, and in the chambers shared by pupils and teachers; outdoors too, along the paths that led from task to task, and in the gardens. The chapter then considers the spaces inhabited by Corpus members, and the objects which helped form the experiences that made Corpus an ‘emotional community‘.