| Summary: | Despite recent attempts to reassess the culture wars of early Enlightenment England as conversations between educated individuals about pivotal and often technical matters, academics of the period continue to feature in narratives of intellectual change as the gatekeepers of a decrepit religious establishment. The famous contention of John Henry Newman that universities are at best locations for the ‘diffusion and extension of knowledge’ but not for its advancement thus lives on, and has only been heightened by the persistent supposition among historians that the eighteenth-century English universities ‘surrendered their cultural leadership’. This thesis, however, presents an altogether new perspective on the relationship of Oxford and Cambridge to the wider intellectual life of the period, with a focus on the neglected polemical and scholarly writings of ‘early career’ scholars. During a period coloured by anti-institutional sentiments, young scholars in the universities worked tirelessly to defend the system of knowledge that underwrote the curricula of their institutions, and, indeed, academic authority at large. They also aspired to operate smoothly within, and ideally govern, a rapidly expanding vernacular ‘public sphere’, aware that their task of defending the Church of England depended upon them successfully doing so. In my account, the shortcoming of the eighteenth-century English universities in terms of the relative dearth of impartial ‘research’ publications was not a result of their being impervious to ‘polite’ society but rather of their obsessive and often very successful attempts to engage with it.
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