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Some Trends in Scholarship, 1868–1968, in the field of Medieval History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

M. D. Knowles
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Extract

Although the formation of our Society was not directly due to movements in the academic world, it did in fact take place shortly before a new epoch opened in English historiography. In 1868 the study of history as an academic discipline was non-existent in England save as part of a classical education. In that field those who seriously attempted to portray the ancient civilization were controlled by an austere literary tradition, and by the excellence and relatively small bulk of their sources. In addition to this, the work of the great Germans from Niebuhr to Mommsen penetrated to England long before Ranke and his seminar, or the early Monumentists, were known and imitated at Oxford and Cambridge. Consequently, the classical historians such as Thirlwall, Grote, Arnold and Finlay were far more sober, critical and quellenmässig than their contemporaries in English history. But they had no direct influence on historians in other fields or on academic practice, and they were all in a sense amateurs: Thirlwall was a bishop, Grote a banker, Finlay a man of private means and Arnold primarily a headmaster. In other fields of history the four principal names—and admittedly very great names—are of men who wrote either all or at least a principal part of their works as individuals at home and without academic position

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 19 , December 1969 , pp. 139 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1969

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References

page 140 note 1 For the historiography of the period 1815–50 in Germany almost the only work in English is still that of Gooch, G. P., History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913; 2nd edn, 1952).Google Scholar

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page 142 note 1 See N. J. Williams, ‘Stubbs’s Appointment as Regius Professor, 1866’, in Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xxxiii (May, 1960), 121–25. Stubbs had applied for the Chichele chair in 1862, but had been passed over. In 1866 he refused to put in his name for the Regius chair.

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page 142 note 5 Ibid., 40.

page 143 note 1 Ibid., 382.

page 143 note 2 Ibid., 55.

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page 143 note 5 Ibid., 24.

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page 148 note 1 Church and State in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913). The composition of these lectures dates from several years earlier.Google Scholar

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page 151 note 1 Besides his standard works on the conciliar epoch, N. Valois contributed articles of importance to the Histoire littéraire de la France.

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page 156 note 1 The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1927).Google Scholar

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