History and Historians

This book makes a selection of writings by the great medieval historian, Sir Richard Southern, available to the wider audience they deserve.

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• A collection of writings by the great medieval historian, Sir Richard Southern.
  
• Offers a fascinating insight into the beliefs and ideas that underpinned Southern’s work.
  
• Contains the series of reflections on medieval historical writing that Southern produced during his tenure as President of the Royal Historical Society.
  
• Also includes pieces on the nature of academic history, as well as Southern’s appreciations of other medievalists.
  
• Brings together texts that would otherwise be difficult to locate.
  
• Makes these writings accessible to the wider audience they deserve.

Abbreviations vii

Place of First Publication viii

Preface by Janet Nelson x

Introduction 1

Part I Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing

1 The Classical Tradition from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth 11

2 Hugh of St. Victor and the Idea of Historical Development 30

3 History as Prophecy 48

4 The Sense of the Past 66

Part II History

5 The Shape and Substance of Academic History 87

6 The Historical Experience 104

7 The Truth about the Past 120

Part III Historians

8 Review of The Letters of Frederic William Maitland 137

9 Sir Maurice Powicke (1879–1963) 144

10 Vivian Hunter Galbraith (1889–1976) 168

11 Richard William Hunt (1908–1979) 193

12 Marjorie Reeves as a Historian 218

13 Beryl Smalley (1905–1984) 225

Notes 240

Bibliography of the Publications of R. W. Southern 260

Index 271

"This collection of selected papers by one of Britain's finest historians, edited and introduced with distinction by R. J. Bartlett, captures the essence of Southern's meditative insights into the nature of the historical experience and the methodologies of historians of tboth the medieval and modern era." History Sir Richard Southern was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1912 and educated at the Royal Grammar School there and at Balliol College, Oxford. He was a Fellow of Balliol from 1937-61, Chichele Professor of History at Oxford from 1961-9, and President of St John’s College, Oxford from 1969-81. He was knighted in 1974. He died in Oxford in 2001.

Robert Bartlett is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Medieval History at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has also taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and Chicago and has held Fellowships at the Universities of Michigan, Princeton and Göttingen. His book, The Making of Europe (1993) won the Wolfson Literary Prize for History.

R. W. Southern (1912–2001) is widely regarded as one of the greatest medieval historians. His first book, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), translated into many languages and never out of print, is recognized as a classic. This volume contains the series of reflections on medieval historical writing that Southern produced during his tenure as President of the Royal Historical Society, supplemented by his occasional pieces on two related subjects: the nature of academic history and appreciations of other medievalists, both his teachers and his contemporaries. Their publication here in book format makes these writings by a master medievalist accessible to the wider audience they deserve.

The material is introduced by R. J. Bartlett, himself a prominent medievalist, who sheds light on Southern’s outlook and the importance of his work.