This book makes a selection of writings by the great medieval historian, Sir Richard Southern, available to the wider audience they deserve.

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• A collection of writings by the great medieval historian, Sir Richard Southern.
  
• Offers a fascinating insight into the beliefs and ideas that underpinned Southern’s work.
  
• Contains the series of reflections on medieval historical writing that Southern produced during his tenure as President of the Royal Historical Society.
  
• Also includes pieces on the nature of academic history, as well as Southern’s appreciations of other medievalists.
  
• Brings together texts that would otherwise be difficult to locate.
  
• Makes these writings accessible to the wider audience they deserve.

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.