ABSTRACT
Edmund Campion arrived in the newly founded College of Saint John the Baptist, Oxford in 1557 as part of the first group of undergraduates of the new foundation of Sir Thomas White. The period of his time in Oxford lasted till 1570, and he remained a Fellow of St John’s for longer. During that time he rapidly became not just a lecturer in Rhetoric but the most influential scholar in the University, ‘the flower of Oxforde’, as Thomas Alfield says.1 His contemporaries included a dazzling array of writers such as Sir Philip Sidney, Gregory Martin, Richard Bristow, Robert Persons and Thomas Stapleton, and it was among men like these that Campion rapidly became a cult figure, ‘a glass and mirror, a light and lanterne, a pateme and example to youth, to age, to lemed, to unlemed’.2 For, as Allen says, ‘he was brought up in S. John’s colledge of Oxford, passingly beloved for his singular graces’.3 As the anonymous ‘friend and fellow disciple’ in the Concertatio Ecclesiae (1583) makes clear:
Primus eras, princepsque gregis, cessere priores partes & palmam caetera turba tibi.
