Biography
Southern was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in history. At Oxford, Southern's mentors were Sir Maurice Powicke and Vivian Hunter Galbraith. He was a Fellow of Balliol from 1937 to 1961 (where he lectured alongside Christopher Hill), Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1961 to 1969, and President of St John's College, Oxford, from 1969 to 1981. He was president of the Royal Historical Society from 1969 to 1973.
Southern was awarded the Balzan Prize for Medieval History in 1987. He was knighted in 1974. He died in Oxford in 2001.
Southern is one of twenty medieval scholars profiled in Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. Cantor describes Southern in Arthurian terms, with a group of devotees who surrounded their master following the publication of The Making of the Middle Ages. Like Arthurian legend, however, Cantor's story does not have an entirely happy ending, and Cantor describes his sense of disappointment when Southern fails to live up to expectations.
In addition to the influence exerted by his works, Southern had several prominent students who carried his influence into the next generation. Robert Bartlett and R. I. Moore, for example, share Southern's interest in the development of Europe in the High Middle Ages, and Valerie Flint had some of Southern's tendencies towards iconoclasm.
Read more about this topic: R. W. Southern
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