Christopher Tyerman, The History and Pre-History of Hertford College, Oxford: Survival and Renewals (OUP, September 2025)

This book is the first study of the history and pre-history of Hertford College for over a century. Based on archival sources, it examines the college’s origins in two medieval academic halls, Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall, and the short-lived eighteenth-century Hertford College. It is a story of financial and institutional precarity, constant bending to changing fashion, of narrow survival and repeated enforced or deliberate renewals. This history offers a very different perspective on the history of Oxford University to that from wealthier, more established, and secure colleges, revealing in sharper focus the impact of wider cultural, social, demographic, political, religious, and economic circumstances over seven centuries from the thirteenth to the twenty-first.

Watch Professor Tyerman’s John Donne lecture about his book here.