Corpus Christi College’s ‘Trilingual Library’: A Historical Assessment

Abstract

This chapter assesses Corpus Christi College before Erasmus. The first promoters of humanism at the start of the Quattrocento had positioned themselves as counter-cultural. Humanism, that is to say, did not require institutional recognition to thrive, and, in England as elsewhere, it carved out space for itself in the fifteenth-century cultural landscape, within and beyond institutions. Yet, humanists proved a quarrelsome tribe: where the early Quattrocento trailblazers laid their path, others sometimes refused to follow. Over the century, the identity of humanism developed, ramified, and splintered, drawing strength from its conflicts, not only with those it characterized as its implacable opponents, but also among its own proponents. Corpus could draw on these plural identities, and the implication is that the affiliation to Erasmus and his own formulation of humanism was only one possible inspiration among several.