History and Historians

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.

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