Terrae-filius, Or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford, 1721-1726

Book excerpt: Although Amhurst was often dismissed by nineteenth-century historians of Oxford as a bitter "slanderer of his university," his work stands as the single most important and reliable contemporarily published account of life in early eighteenth-century Oxford. The Terrae-Filius essays, despite their satirical bent, also demonstrate that Amhurst had a deep respect for the institution and a clear vision of the intellectual ideas it should embody. This modern critical edition reprints all fifty-three Terrae-Filius essays (including the three omitted from the 1726 collected editions) and provides an introduction and extensive explanatory notes that set the essays in their historical and cultural context."--BOOK JACKET.