This volume investigates the origins and early institutional development of the University of Oxford during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Edited by J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans, this work compiles research from a team of distinguished scholars to document the transition of Oxford from a collection of schools into a structured university. The text examines the intellectual climate of the high age of scholasticism and the evolution of academic discourse leading up to the fourteenth-century philosophical conflicts involving William of Ockham.

Scholars and historians regard this volume as a definitive, foundational reference for the study of medieval English higher education. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which provides a rigorous and comprehensive account of the university's formative years.