[محبة الرسول الأعظم]

The University of Cambridge (informally known as "Cambridge [IMG][/IMG]University" or simply as "Cambridge") is a public research university located in Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in the English-speaking world (after the University of Oxford), and the third-oldest surviving university in the world. In post-nominals the university's name is abbreviated as Cantab, a shortened form of Cantabrigiensis.[5] It is considered to be one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world.[6]
The institute grew out of an association of scholars that was formed in 1209, early records suggest, by scholars leaving Oxford after a dispute with townsfolk.[7] The two "ancient universities" have many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge. Today, Cambridge is a collegiate university with 31 colleges and six academic schools. All these university institutions occupy different locations in the town including purposely-built sites and the student life thrives with numerous opportunities in the arts, sport clubs and societies. Cambridge is also a member of a myriad of academic associations and forms part of the 'golden triangle' of British universities.[8] A total of 89 Nobel Prizes winners are affiliates of the university.[9][not in citation given]The official founding of Cambridge University is traced to the enhancement, by a charter in 1231 from King Henry III of England, which awarded the ius non trahi extra (a right to discipline its own members) plus some exemption from taxes, and a bull in 1233 from Pope Gregory IX that gave graduates from Cambridge the right to teach "everywhere in Christendom".[10]
After Cambridge was described as a studium generale in a letter by Pope Nicholas IV in 1290,[11] and confirmed as such in a bull by Pope John XXII in 1318,[12] it became common for researchers from other European medieval universities to come and visit Cambridge to study or to give lecture courses.[11]
The colleges at the University of Cambridge were originally an incidental feature of the system. No college is as old as the university itself. The colleges were endowed fellowships of scholars. There were also institutions without endowments, called hostels. The hostels were gradually absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, but they have left some indicators of their time, such as the name of Garret Hostel Lane.[13]
Hugh Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse in 1284, Cambridge's first college. Many colleges were founded during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but colleges continued to be established throughout the centuries to modern times, although there was a gap of 204 years between the founding of Sidney Sussex in 1596 and Downing in 1800. The most recently established college is Robinson, built in the late 1970s. However, Homerton College only achieved full university college status in March 2010, making it the newest full college (it was previously an "Approved Society" affiliated with the university).
In medieval times, many colleges were founded so that their members would pray for the souls of the founders, and were often associated with chapels or abbeys. A change in the colleges' focus occurred in 1536 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries. King Henry VIII ordered the university to disband its Faculty of Canon Law[14] and to stop teaching "scholastic philosophy". In response, colleges changed their curricula away from canon law, and towards the classics, the Bible, and mathematics.
As Cambridge moved away from Canon Law, it also moved away from Catholicism. As early as the 1520s, Lutheranism and what was to become more broadly known as the Protestant Reformation were making their presence felt in the intellectual discourse of the university. Among those involved was Thomas Cranmer, later to become Archbishop of Canterbury. As it became convenient to Henry VIII in the 1530s, the King looked to Cranmer and others (within and without Cambridge) to craft a new path that was different from Catholicism yet also different from what Martin Luther had in mind.
Nearly a century later, the university was at the centre of a Protestant schism. Many nobles, intellectuals and even common folk saw the ways of the Church of England as being too similar to the Catholic Church and that it was used by the crown to usurp the rightful powers of the counties. East Anglia was the centre of what became the Puritan movement and at Cambridge, it was particularly strong at Emmanuel, St Catharine's Hall, Sidney Sussex and Christ's College.[15] They produced many "non-conformist" graduates who greatly influenced, by social position or pulpit, the approximately 20,000 Puritans who left for New England and especially the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Great Migration decade of the 1630s. Oliver Cromwell, Parliamentary commander during the English Civil War and head of the English Commonwealth (1649–1660), attended Sidney Sussex.