Magdalene College

Magdalene College (pronounced Template:IPA) was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary Magdalene, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The refoundation was largely the work of Sir Thomas Audley, Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII. Audley also gave the College its motto: 'garde ta foy' - keep your faith. Audley's successors in the Mastership and as benefactors of the College were however prone to dire ends; several benefactors were arraigned at various stages on charges of high treason and executed.

The College's most famous son is Samuel Pepys, whose papers and books were donated to the College upon his death, and are now housed in the Pepys Library, the most beautiful building within the College. Magdalene is both famous and notorious for its 'traditional' style, boasting both a well-regarded candlelit formal hall (held every evening) and the distinction of having been the last previously all-male College in Oxford or Cambridge to admit women in 1988 (Oriel College was the last in Oxford, admitting women in 1985).

Aesthetically Magdalene's old College buildings are beautiful if representative of the College's ramshackle growth from a monks' foundation into a centre of education. It is also distinctive in that most of the old buildings are in brick rather than stone (save for the frontage of the Pepys Library). Magdalene Street divides the most ancient courts from more recent developments. One of the accommodation blocks in the newer part of the college was built by Edwin Lutyens in the early 1930s.

Magdalene remains, despite this twentieth-century expansion, one of the smaller colleges within the University, at last count numbering over 300 undergraduates and an expanding postgraduate community. Opened in 2005 was Cripps Court, on Chesterton Road, featuring new undergraduate rooms and conference facilities. The current Master is Duncan Robinson.