CAIUS, John

by John Caius

£2,750 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition of this important, though extravagant, history of the University of Cambridge, which was published anonymously with a text by Thomas Caius arguing the case for Oxford being the oldest English University. John Caius [Kees, Keys] was an English physician, and second founder of the present Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was born at Norwich on the 6th of October 1510. He was admitted a student at what was then Gonville Hall, Cambridge, where he seems to have mainly studied divinity. After graduating in 1533, he visited Italy, where he studied under the celebrated Montanus and Vesalius at Padua; and in 1541 he took his degree in physic at Padua. In 1543 he visited several parts of Italy, Germany and France; and returned to England. He was a physician in London in 1547, and was admitted fellow of the College of Physicians, of which he was for many years president. In 1557, being then physician to Queen Mary, he enlarged the foundation of his old college, changed the name from Gonville Hall to Gonville and Caius College, and endowed it with several considerable estates, adding an entire new court at the expense of £1834. Of this college he accepted the mastership (24th of January 1558/9) on the death of Dr Bacon, and held it till about a month before his death. DNB. The controversy on the respective claims of Oxford and Cambridge to the greater antiquity arose, according to Caius, on the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Cambridge in 1564, when the University Orator

• Binding: Hardcover

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