Sir Richard William Southern, who
published as “R.W. Southern,” was a medieval historian born on 8 February
(coming up!) 1912 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He died at home (I believe, Oxford)
on 6 February 2001. Among medieval historians, Southern is one of the greats: a
masterful scholar with a lively writing style who was a good, generous teacher.
It is a winning, but often elusive, combination.
According to M.H. Keen’s
biography of Southern in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, among “his family and friends and by his
pupils he was always known as Dick.” Obviously, Southern belongs on this blog!
Although I was never a friend or pupil of Southern’s (he retired before I was
born), I’m going to take liberties and call him Dick. After all, this is a Dick
blog (and you might have noticed, careful reader, that I often call people I
like Richard or Dick and people I don’t by their last names. This is not 100% true
for the cool guys, but I never call the jerks Richard).
Dick attended Balliol College,
Oxford from 1929 to 1932 (naturally graduating with a first). After doing some
work on a second bachelor’s (related to economics), Dick received a fellowship
at Exeter College, Oxford and returned to the welcoming embrace of medieval
history. In 1937, Dick became a fellow and tutor back at Balliol, where he
taught until he enlisted for military service in the Second World War. It was
while he was serving at the Foreign Office that he met his wife, Shelia, whom
he married in 1944. The couple had two sons and were very happy together.
After the war, Dick went back to
Balliol and kept lecturing and tutoring. Unfortunately, he came down with
tuberculosis and had to leave the university in October 1949. Dick spent 1950
in a hospital and a sanatorium, recovering from the lung ailment. Without his
busy teaching schedule, and with a lot of time on his hands, Dick wrote his
most-famous book, The Making of the
Middle Ages. It was published in 1953, quickly became a bestseller, and has
been translated into twenty-seven languages. Generally speaking, the book
discusses the intellectual, social, and economic developments that intertwined
and thereby contributed to the flowering of civilization in the central middle
ages. It’s a good book; you should read it.
Dick recovered from his
tuberculosis and returned to Oxford. He continued to teach at Balliol until
1960 when he was promoted to the Chichele professorship of modern history at
All Souls, Oxford. Despite the title (modern history), this was the top
medieval post at Oxford. Explain that!
At All Souls, Dick kept being
awesome, helping tons of postgraduate students and publishing work on St.
Anselm. Although St
Anselm and his Biographer (1963) was a labor of love (and twenty-five years
of work), it’s not as famous as The Making
of the Middle Ages. It’s still an awesome book; however, it’s a lot longer
than The Making, which no doubt had
an effect on its popularity.
From 1969 to
1981, Dick was president of St. John’s College, Oxford. During this time, he began
to lose his hearing; after his retirement, he succumbed to complete deafness.
Dick never let that stop him, though: he gave public lectures into his eighties
and he welcomed friends and colleagues into his home. Sometimes people would
just have to write down the important parts of the conversation for him to
read, and he would easily join in the chatter.
During his
retirement, Dick published another great book about another cool medieval
person: Robert Grosseteste: the Growth of
an English Mind in Medieval Europe (1986). In 1990, Dick published another
book about St. Anselm, and he was working on a trilogy about medieval
universities when he died. Volumes one and two made it to press (volume two in
the year of his death), but it looks like volume three will never be
forthcoming: Dick hadn’t progressed far enough in his work for what he left
behind to be published.
Finally, Dick
was knighted in 1974. That’s such an appropriate honor for a medievalist.
Source:
M. H. Keen, ‘Southern, Sir Richard William
(1912–2001)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, Jan 2005; online edn, Jan 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com.]
Aren't medievalist Dicks awesome? (Hmm. Maybe I should rephrase that . . .)
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