Dr Hackett discovered in the Angelica Library in Rome a manuscript containing a unique text of the first constitution of Cambridge University. The centrepiece of this book is a critical edition of the text with an English translation on facing pages. The importance of his discovery for historians of Cambridge and of medieval university education cannot be overestimated. The Cambridge constitutions form a complete code, promulgated at a remarkably early date (c. 1250). Dr Hackett shows that Oxford lagged more than 50 years behind Cambridge in codifying its statutes and neither Paris nor Bologna, the oldest of all universities, had a written constitution or code of laws at this time.

First published in 1988, this book traces the complex evolution of Oxford and Cambridge from the twelfth through the early sixteenth centuries. In the process, the author incorporates new research on Cambridge University that has become available only recently. Alan B. Cobban is able to give an overall view of the functioning of the English universities, touching on the development of the academic hierarchy, the various features of the curriculum and the teaching offered by these institutions. The author also addresses the social and economic circumstances of students and the relations between the universities and their respective town and ecclesiastical authorities. Cobban draws on much recent work to supply new details and altered perspectives in this single-volume reappraisal of the history of these two distinguished educational institutions.

The new edition documents the early times of our universities by means of accurate transcriptions and critical discussions of the Charters of Foundation and Early Documents of the Group's thirty-seven universities.