Richard William Southern

Sir Richard William Southern (born February 8, 1912 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne , † February 6, 2001 in Oxford ) was a British medieval historian.

Life

Southern was the son of a wood importer, went to Newcastle to school and studied history at Balliol College of Oxford University . His teachers included Frederick Maurice Powicke , who added biographical references to the constitutional history-oriented approach established by William Stubbs at the Modern History School at Oxford, taking into account, for example, family and friendships, and Vivian Hunter Galbraith , an energetic former public archivist Record Office, which greatly influenced him. In 1931 he won the university's Alexander Prize for an essay on the cleric and politician Ranulf Flambard and received a five-year junior fellowship from Exeter College. In 1933/34 he was with Ferdinand Lot in Paris and in 1935 in Munich. From 1937 he was the successor to Galbraith Fellow of Balliol College, which he remained until 1961. During the Second World War he was an officer, including a tank commander and captain, and from 1943 in the Intelligence Department of the Foreign Ministry as a major. In 1945 he was again a tutor and later a university lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford. He was a colleague of Christopher Hill there . 1948/49 he was Proctor of the University of Oxford. 1961 to 1969 Chichele Professor of Modern History at All Souls College. In 1969 he gave up his chair and was President of St. John's College in Oxford until 1981.

He dealt with medieval intellectual history, including Robert Grosseteste , Anselm von Canterbury and the image of Islam in the European Middle Ages (the book arose from lectures at Harvard University and was published in 1962). His biography of Anselm and his biographer Eadmer emerged from his Birkbeck lectures in 1959 (in 1990 he presented a new, completely revised Anselm biography). His influential 1953 book The making of the middle ages is considered to be his major work (it has been translated into 27 languages) which made his name famous. He wrote it during a convalescence of tuberculosis. In 1970 his book Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages was published as part of Penguin Church history. His late work Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe (1995, 1997) on European universities in the Middle Ages remained unfinished (the third volume never appeared). He also spoke out against overrating and romanticizing the Chartres School .

In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize , the 100,000 pounds of which he donated to St. Hilda's College, Oxford for a scholarship in medieval history, which was named after his tutor Galbraith. In 1974 he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor . He was President of the Royal Historical Society from 1968 to 1972 . In 1960 he was elected to the British Academy and in 1972 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1944 he married Sheila Crichton-Miller, the widow of an RAF pilot, who had been his secretary in the Foreign Office, and they had two sons.

Fonts

• The Making of the Middle Ages, Yale University Press, 1953
  • German edition: Spiritual and social history of the Middle Ages: the occident in the 11th and 12th centuries, Kohlhammer 1980
• Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, Harvard University Press, 1962
  • German translation: The Islamic image of the Middle Ages. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1981
• Editor and translator: The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, by Eadmer, Nelson, 1962, 2nd edition 1972
• St Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought 1059-c.1130, Cambridge University Press, 1963
• Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, Penguin, 1970
• Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, 1970
• Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1970–1973 (Presidential Lectures)
• Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 2nd edition 1992
• St. Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, Cambridge University Press, 1990
• Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 volumes, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 1997, Reprint 2001
• History and Historians: Selected Papers of RW Southern, edited by Robert Bartlett, Blackwell Publishing, 2004

literature

• Norman Cantor : Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century, Harper Perennial 1993
• Alexander Murray: Richard William Southern, 1912-2001 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 120 , 2003, p. 413-442 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard William Southern in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary in the Guardian February 8, 2001
• Entry in Making History