to the 2009 edition
The first Creighton Lecture was given on 4 October 1907 by Thomas Hodgkin at University College, thereby inaugurating a series of lectures in history supported ever since by the Creighton Memorial Fund. Over the subsequent century, the lecture has been given by many who would unquestionably be regarded as among the most eminent historians employed in British universities; and – just occasionally – by non-British ones. The present volume celebrates this remarkable series and also the immense contribution to historical scholarship over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the historians of the University of London.
While it is a salutary reflection on all fund-raising projects that Louise Creighton’s and the committee’s original objective was to support a lectureship or professorship in history, the compensation for the failure to raise the required endowment has been a profoundly influential series of lectures. This volume publishes ten of these lectures, selected and introduced by a distinguished historian from a department represented on the University’s Board of Studies in History, the body responsible for choosing the lecturer on the basis of recommendations drawn from the history departments in the colleges. The earliest lecture published dates from 1913; the latest from 2004. Each introduction is significantly different in approach, usually reflecting on the lecture’s contemporary and historiographical significance, the career and contribution of the lecturer, and in some cases inserting personal memories of the occasion on which the lecture was given. The volume also contains the full text of the centenary Creighton Lecture given in the Great Hall of King’s College by Professor Robert Evans on 26 November 2007. Professor Evans’s lecture constitutes a magnificent commentary on what we may surely call the Creighton Century, taking the opportunity to use the lectures as a prism through which has been refracted since 1907 historians’ attitudes to Europe and to Mandell Creighton’s own historical ideals.
It is a particular personal pleasure for me to contribute this foreword since, as the then Director of the Institute of Historical Research, I was responsible for organizing the lectures between 2003 and 2008. That time brought home to me with great force some things that I in truth already knew, but of which it does no harm to remind myself and, through this foreword, others. The first is that the University of London hosts one of the great lectures in history in the British Isles, a responsibility that it has discharged with great distinction. The second is that collectively the historians in the history departments of the London colleges and the various institutes which now make up the School of Advanced Study constitute one of the most numerous and intellectually powerful conglomerates of historians in the world. In these days when the federal University has been greatly decentralized, it is worth bearing in mind the sheer power and brilliance of this collective mass. The third is that the ideals that animated Mandell and Louise Creighton, namely respect for the highest standards of scholarship, historical impartiality, the international importance of the study of history, and an unshakeable commitment to history’s significance in national and public life, are every bit as relevant now as they were in 1907. In celebrating a century of Creighton Lectures, this volume looks forward to the achievements of the second Creighton Century.
David Bates
7 January 2009