ABSTRACT
This paper examines Bartolomé Carranza's relations with, and influence on, the English universities, and it may be wise at the outset to dampen expectations. For whether or not there is a subject here at all rather depends on the national provenances and languages of the surviving documentary evidence. There has always been confusion about the length and stages of the visitation, due to the deficiencies of documentary sources and, indirectly, to Wood's handling of what does appear in them. From 1557, there is another important source for Carranza's thinking in respect of the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford that is his surviving correspondence with Villagarcúa, commencing before his departure from England but dating mainly from after that moment. If the advent of Queen Elizabeth unravelled Marian intentions that the two universities should be a force for the catechizing and recatholicization of England, that does not mean that what had gone before was foredoomed to collapse or to failure.
