Obscure, significant events: R. W. Southern and the meaning of scholarship

Abstract

This essay is the memory of a scholar's encounter as a young man with a book that changed his life: Richard W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, first published in 1953. Through an autobiographical reflection on the reading of this book when he was a college student, the writer, who is not a medievalist, attempts to convey the postwar context at Oxford in which Southern crafted his text as well as the affinities Southern's own scholarship, with its attention to the new sensibilities of the twelfth century, had to the changes taking place in academic culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By exploring the personal influence Southern's writing had on him, the author seeks to reinforce Southern's own view of scholarship and the life of the mind as powerful forces in the shaping of history. As Southern observed, ‘[t]he significant events are often the obscure ones, and the significant utterances are often those of men withdrawn from the world and speaking to very few’.