Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as an Emotional Community

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the aesthetic of the cultural moment at which Corpus Christi College was founded: 1517 lies on the cusp between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in England. If one accepts that cusp as fundamentally contested, it remains fruitful to explore how the main actors in affairs of Church and State manifest certain tastes and ideas, combining ‘medieval‘ and ‘Renaissance‘ themes, that are identifiable as elements of coterie-signalling. Two artefacts directly associated with Richard Fox, the College’s founder, stand as such signals, that is material testimonies to group-definition in the dominant sub-culture. The chapter then draws on the wider ecclesiastical and court milieu to explore how performative gestures in the patronage of the built environment have counterparts in actual performance, in the pageantry and plays of the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century.