Enlightened Oxford. The University and the Cultural and Political Life of Eighteenth‐Century Britain and Beyond. By NigelAston. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2023. xxiii, 819pp. Hardback. £120.00. ISBN 9780199246830

It is now nearly 40 years since the 18th-century volume of The History of the University of Oxford, edited by Sutherland and Mitchell, was published. In the meantime, our knowledge of every aspect of late Stuart and Hanoverian Britain has been greatly extended, so a reassessment of the role of the senior of England's two universities in the Age of Enlightenment is sorely needed. Traditionally, the period has been seen as one in which the university was asleep. Contemporary critics accused the dons of contributing nothing to the commonwealth and historians for the past two centuries have largely taken them at their word. Sutherland and Mitchell's volume went some way to challenge the traditional view, but not a lot, and the author of this present review broadly endorsed the time-honoured picture in his 2016 overview of Oxford's history. Aston's account completely shatters the mould. In his view, 18th-century Oxford has been totally misunderstood and grossly maligned. Far from wallowing in torpor, it was vibrant and significant. His study makes four claims. In the first place, Oxford was extremely successful in fulfilling its fundamental purpose in an age before the research university was invented: it ably defended the Church of England against dissenters and freethinkers who would have liked to have destroyed the confessional state and its hold over the population. Secondly, through keeping the Whig government at bay during the reigns of George I and George II, it provided the intellectual and social space for moderate loyalist toryism to survive until the accession of George III issued in a patriot king. Thirdly, 18th-century Oxford dons made a much larger contribution to the development of the arts and sciences than has hitherto been acknowledged, and many were active and respected members of the European-wide Republic of Letters. Fourthly, and the most radical claim of all, Oxford should be seen as part of the Enlightenment, not an anti-Enlightenment dinosaur. It certainly did not belong to Jonathan Israel's atheistical and democratic Enlightenment. But, through its readiness to find new ways of defending Anglican Christianity, its commitment to critical enquiry and its interest in promoting the natural sciences, it was recognisably part of the much larger moderate Enlightenment which was to be found all over protestant and much of catholic Europe. Aston is to be congratulated on producing an elegantly written and scholarly book which is based on an exhaustive study of material in libraries and archives on both sides of the Atlantic. It is safe to say that in future 18th-century Oxford will no longer be dismissed as inconsequential. His account of the university as the lynchpin of the Church of England and tory loyalism is particularly securely grounded. This reviewer would have liked to have heard more about the religious and political education that the university provided its sons, but Aston's description of the patronage network in which Oxford was enmeshed and through which it exerted its influence over church and state has never been bettered. It would have been useful, too, to have learnt whether low church and whiggish Cambridge was as successful in winning the hearts and minds of its alumni, but this is for others to investigate. Equally, it is for others to look more deeply into the abiding attachment that Oxford students felt for their colleges, so clearly attested to in their willingness to fund the building programmes of their alma mater. Aston sees this as the quid pro quo of the direct and indirect patronage that a college could offer. This may be so, but it would be good to see the hypothesis tested by a prosopographical study of the names in a surviving donor book. The claim for Oxford's intellectual vibrancy is less successfully asserted. Aston provides a litany of names, but he never gives any indication as to what proportion of the fellows and professors at any one time were involved in creative scholarship. Admittedly, the fellows were supposed to be preparing for a higher degree, not engaging in research, but there are plenty of signs that many were not involved in any form of academic study. James Woodforde and his friends at New College in the mid-century seem to have passed their time doing little but drinking and playing heads and tails in the fellows’ common room. But at least they were resident. Most Magdalen fellows were permanently elsewhere. Aston also assumes that any contribution to the arts and sciences made by a person with an Oxford attachment is a positive endorsement of the university's cultural vitality. Given that individuals, such as the astronomer James Bradley, held multiple positions and did their research elsewhere, it needs to be demonstrated that Oxford meant anything more to them than a source of income. In fact, most members of the 18th-century Republic of Letters were independent scholars and scientists, who usually had no university attachment. There is little point in searching for evidence of research in 18th-century Oxford when that was not part of its rationale. Oxford might have been visited by numerous foreign scholars, though not as many as Aston implies. But they came either to use the Bodleian or to see the architecture. They were seldom looking to meet scholars. When the renowned Italian antiquarian and naturalist, Francesco Scipione Maffei, passed through Oxford in the 1730s with his French amanuensis, they only sought out one Oxford fellow; Richard Shaw, Regius Professor in Greek, who had done important work identifying Roman sites while chaplain in Algiers and whom they had already met in Paris. All their intellectual contacts while in England were made in London. Making claims for Oxford as an Enlightenment institution equally seem otiose. Enlightenment historians might be divided over how anti-establishment the movement was. But they are agreed that at heart its members believed in humanity's moral and material amelioration. There is no sign that any of the Oxford intellectuals identified by Aston, apart from the few Whigs among them, were optimistic about mankind's future. It is true that even antiquarians, like Maffei, thought they were enlightened in that by recovering a ‘true’ history of the past, they were freeing human beings from myth and superstition. It is quite possible that there were Oxford scholars who believed that this was the case as well. But if so, their publications and correspondence need to be scrutinised to see if they used ‘light’ metaphors in describing their activities and their findings. Just to call Oxford dons enlightened because they engaged in critical study is stretching an elastic concept to breaking point. It may be that it is time that the Enlightenment as an historical construct is jettisoned in that the term is already too capacious. If so, Aston would have done better to use what evidence there is of Oxford's intellectual vibrancy to help kill the term rather than expand it further. None of this, though, is to deny Aston's achievement in rescuing Oxford from her contemporary critics (homegrown, dissenters and Scots) and demonstrating it was an institution to be reckoned with in the 18th century. His book's strength lies in the very fact that its highly original thesis commands attention and demands to be engaged with.