THE OXFORD REFORMERS:
COLET, ERASMUS, AND MORE.
CHAPTER I.
I. JOHN COLET RETURNS FROM ITALY TO OXFORD (1496).
John Colet announces lectures on St. Paul’s Epistles.
Only graduates in Theology might lecture on the Bible.
It was probably in Michaelmas Term of 1496[6] that the announcement was made to doctors and students of the University of Oxford that John Colet, a late student, recently returned from Italy, was about to deliver a course of public and gratuitous lectures in exposition of St. Paul’s Epistles.
This was an event of no small significance and perhaps of novelty in the closing years of that last of the Middle Ages; not only because the Scriptures for some generations had been practically ignored at the Universities, but still more so because the would-be lecturer had not as yet entered deacon’s orders,[7] nor had obtained, or even tried to obtain, any theological degree.[8] It is true that he had passed through the regular academical course at Oxford, and was entitled, as a Master of Arts, to lecture upon any other subject.[9] But a degree in Arts did not, it would seem, entitle the graduate to lecture upon the Bible.[10]
It does not perhaps follow from this, that Colet was guilty of any flagrant breach of university statutes, which, as a graduate in Arts, he must have sworn to obey. The very extent to which real study of the Scriptures had become obsolete at Oxford, may possibly suggest that even the statutory restrictions on Scripture lectures may have become obsolete also.[11]
Before the days of Wiclif, the Bible had been free, and Bishop Grosseteste could urge Oxford students to devote their best morning hours to Scripture lectures.[12] But an unsuccessful revolution ends in tightening the chains which it ought to have broken. During the fifteenth century the Bible was not free. And Scripture lectures, though still retaining a nominal place in the academical course of theological study, were thrown into the background by the much greater relative importance of the lectures on ‘the Sentences.’ What Biblical lectures were given were probably of a very formal character.[13]