A 1585 Oxford Ceremonial Student Oration

Orations from university ceremonial occasions provide important evidence about standards of learning and rhetoric valued in university culture. At Oxford, the most significant yearly ceremony was the comitia, or Act. Preceded by the vesperies ceremony the previous Saturday, the Monday Act marked the occasion when students incepted, that is, received their licences to become masters or doctors and members of convocation, the university’s governing body. However, there are few surviving sixteenth-century speeches from the Act, and indeed few extant orations from other Oxford ceremonial occasions. An anonymous printer published the main master of arts speeches from the Acts of 1585 and 1586 in a single volume. This chapter focuses on the oration of 1585, perhaps authored by Thomas Savile, younger brother of the more famous polymath Henry. Besides being of interest for this possible authorship, it is significant for its connections, as yet unnoted by historians, to contemporary politics and to Jean Bodin.