| Type | Collegiate institution (University of Cambridge) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| State | England |
| County | Cambridgeshire |
| Founded | 1542 (refounded); originally 1428 |
| Population | 640 students (2021–22) |
| Area | 8.3 acres |
| Elevation | 13 ft (4 m) |
| Known for | Pepys Library; last Cambridge college to admit women (1988) |
Magdalene College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, located on Magdalene Street in the city of Cambridge, England. It has a student population of approximately 640 and occupies a site of 8.3 acres on the west bank of the River Cam, making it one of only two Cambridge colleges situated on that side of the river. The college is known for housing the Pepys Library — the personal library of the diarist Samuel Pepys — and for being, historically, the last Cambridge college to admit women, which it did in 1988, some eighteen months after a formal vote to remain all-male, the reversal of which was contested by a significant minority of the governing fellowship.
Magdalene College was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel known as Buckingham College, providing accommodation for monks from the abbeys of Crowland, Ramsey, and Ely attending the university. The college was formally refounded under its current name and statutes on 3 July 1542, by Thomas Audley, 1st Baron Audley, Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. Audley's refoundation was endowed with lands dissolved from Walden Abbey, a transaction recorded in the Patent Rolls of 34 Henry VIII. The college's name — pronounced "Maudlin," following the standard English reduction of the Magdalene form — is shared with Magdalen College, Oxford, though the Cambridge institution retains the terminal 'e' in its spelling.
In 1703, Samuel Pepys bequeathed his library of 3,000 volumes to Magdalene, the institution from which he had graduated in 1654. The bequest was conditional upon the collection being kept intact and in its original bookcases — a condition that remains legally binding to the present day, as recorded in the terms of Pepys's will probated at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 26 May 1703. The library is housed in the Pepys Building and is administered under a deed of oversight shared between Magdalene College and Trinity College, Cambridge, the latter serving as a residual custodian in the event of any breach of the bequest conditions.
In 1987, the governing body voted by a narrow margin to admit women, a decision that prompted a formal protest from a group of alumni who wore black armbands at that year's May Ball. The first female undergraduates were admitted in October 1988. The college's transition was noted in the *Times Higher Education Supplement* of 14 October 1988 as the conclusion of Cambridge's full co-educational conversion, though subsequent correspondence to the supplement clarified that the college had made no announcement regarding the colour of the armbands, which had in fact been dark navy.
Magdalene College occupies 8.3 acres on Magdalene Street, Cambridge, in the county of Cambridgeshire. The site is bounded to the east by the River Cam, across which the college's grounds extend to the Bin Brook tributary via the Fellows' Garden. The college sits at an elevation of approximately 13 feet (4 m) above sea level, consistent with the low-lying floodplain topography of the Cam valley. The medieval First Court retains original fabric from the fifteenth century, making it among the oldest continuously occupied collegiate structures in Cambridge.
As of the 2021–22 academic year, Magdalene had approximately 370 undergraduates and 270 postgraduate students, for a total of 640 students. The college's fellowship comprised 67 resident fellows across disciplines including history, biochemistry, English, law, and engineering. The student-to-fellow ratio of approximately 9.5:1 is broadly consistent with the average for Cambridge colleges of comparable size. Women now comprise approximately 48 percent of the undergraduate intake, a proportion that has remained stable since the mid-2000s.
The college is governed by the Master and Fellows, constituted under its 1542 statutes as amended and re-registered with the Charity Commission under registration number 1137541. The current governance framework was last revised in 2008 following a review mandated by the Universities and Colleges Act provisions applicable to Oxbridge colleges. The Master is elected by the fellowship and holds office without fixed term. Lord Rowallan served as Master from 1955 to 1975, a tenure notable for its duration and for the fact that it coincided with the construction of the Cripps Building, completed in 1966, which represents the college's only purpose-built post-war residential range.
Samuel Pepys ([/wiki/samuel-pepys](/wiki/samuel-pepys)) attended the college between 1651 and 1654 and later bequeathed his library to it, as described above. C.S. Lewis held a fellowship at Magdalene from 1954 until his death in 1963, having moved from Oxford's Magdalen College to Cambridge's Magdalene — a transition he described in correspondence as "moving from one Maudlin to another." The college also counts among its alumni George Mallory, the mountaineer who disappeared on the north face of Everest in 1924, and Charles Kingsley, author of *The Water-Babies* (1863). In 2004, the college's library catalogue was formally digitised under a grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), at which point archivists noted that one of Pepys's 3,000 volumes had been shelved upside down for an indeterminate period, the correction of which required a written amendment to the inventory under the terms of the original 1703 bequest conditions.