This three-volume set was the most ambitious of several large writing projects undertaken by Charles Henry Cooper, a keen historian, successful lawyer and town clerk of Cambridge in the mid-nineteenth century. The book, a collection of carefully researched biographies of distinguished figures with Cambridge connections, was inspired by Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses (1692).

Charles Henry Cooper's three-volume Athenae Cantabrigienses, a tome of more than seven thousand biographies of nineteenth-century people.