"Plesures in lernyng" and the politics of counsel in early Elizabethan England: royal visits to Cambridge and Oxford

This essay provides a close contextual analysis of Elizabeth I's visits to Cambridge in 1564 and Oxford in 1566. Getting beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, it reconstructs the polemical pitches of all manner of scholarly exercises—plays, sermons, orations, and academic disputations. At the forefront of national politics, religion and the succession dominated the two royal visits, their often‐provocative treatment revealing tensions within the universities and the Elizabethan regime. In 1566, Oxford made a more reformed and orthodox showing than Cambridge two years earlier, even though Cambridge, fount of the evangelical movement, had less distance to travel. Both visits illustrate the degree to which the councillors and courtiers hoped to use the suasive powers of the universities to manage the young Queen and her policies. Yet far from a scene of one‐way traffic in advice dispensation, such occasions also helped forge closer links between the country's political, clerical, and intellectual elites