Pairings: Richard Serjeantson

Richard Serjeantson

Fellow in History

Three hundred years before Trinity College admitted women for the first time as Fellows and students, it placed four women on the frontispiece of the Wren Library. These female figures represented the studies that were undertaken by the men (and boys) who then inhabited Trinity.

The identities of three of these figures are well known: they are theology (Theologia), law (Jurisprudentia), and medicine (Medicina), the only three professional disciplines then taught in universities. But the fourth statue, the one photographed here, has been consistently misidentified. She is always said to depict the discipline of mathematics.

But although Isaac Newton was a Fellow of Trinity at the time she was carved, this is wrong. Instead, she represents all the studies that were then pursued in the University’s Faculty of Arts. What she is counting on her fingers are not numbers, but arguments made in accordance with the principles of the art of logic; and the armillary sphere at her feet represents not so much the mathematical science of astronomy, as the science of ‘natural philosophy’ as a whole. She therefore offers us a noble representation of the whole range of undergraduate studies we teach and learn at Trinity, both in the sciences and the arts and humanities.

I came in early one sunny winter’s day with my camera to catch the figure who should now be known as Philosophia in a raking dawn light. The environmental depredations of three centuries, and especially the acid rain of the last, have weathered her friable limestone, but the principles she represents continue to survive – and now, happily, she and her three companions are no longer the only women in Trinity College.