Padua and the Tudors: English students in Italy, 1485–1603

Given the importance of Padua in the English renaissance of the sixteenth century, it is surprising that there has been no detailed study of just what English students, travellers, and spies learned when they were there, or of their impact once back in England. Medical historians have long been familiar with "Linacre tradition" and "the lure of Padua", but Jonathan Woolfson puts their conclusions into a wider context. He shows that more lawyers than intending physicians studied at Padua, and makes out a strong case for the influence of Paduan legal thought on English law, especially at the end of the sixteenth century. He also explores, more suggestively, the various ways in which the returning students interpreted to their fellow Englishmen the lessons they had gained from Italy about state organization or simply the latest in literary trends. The book concludes with a very valuable listing of all Englishmen known to have been in Padua in the sixteenth century. It deliberately excludes English travellers known only from records of stays in Venice, although most would have passed through Padua, and names only doubtfully associated with Padua. Here one might feel that the line has been too narrowly drawn. Thomas Vavasour and George Turner, Catholic exiles who took a medical degree from the Studio in Venice, will almost certainly have studied in Padua, and Edmund Fornell, or Tornell, of Salisbury, graduated in philosophy in Venice in 1593 and in theology at Padua in 1594, see Richard Palmer, The studio of Venice, 1983. The role of Padua in the development of English medicine is generally well covered, although interesting details are missed, and the name of J J Bylebyl disappears completely on page 178. The Italian bias imparted to the College of Physicians by Linacre, Chambers, and many early members is rightly noted, but the increased support given to the College by Cardinal Pole under Mary Tudor is passed over. Given how many of the College's leading members had been Pole's friends in Padua, it is not surprising that he took the College's side in its attempts to impose its will on the recalcitrant English universities. Reference to Sir George Clark's History of the College or to Christopher Brooke's History of Caius College would have helped to explain the influence of Padua and medical teachers like Da Monte, while at the same time also pointing out what was not brought back. John Friar's Greek library may also have included an important volume (or two) of Galen, the mysterious Codex Adelphi. One major theme hardly discussed is religion. Numbers of Englishmen at Padua fluctuated considerably, a fact not entirely explicable by a definition of the English Nation that might include Bretons, Burgundians, and Piedmontese. Several Marian exiles, like William Turner, made their way briefly to Padua, but many of those who studied there in the 1560s onwards were Catholic exiles or had Catholic sympathies. William Harvey in 1602 took the oath of Catholic faith while obtaining his degree from the count palatine, but the notary deliberately left that incriminating detail off his official degree certificate. But apart from a passing reference to the 1560s and 1570s as an age of religious Cold War, Woolfson does not expressly look at the religious affiliations of Paduan students, or seek to explain the increase in numbers of Englishmen from 1580 onwards (including Edward Jordan,