to the 2020 edition
The first edition of The Creighton Century was published in 2009 to mark the recent centenary of the Creighton Lectures at the University of London. The lecture series was established, and substantially supported by, the historian and social activist Louise Hume Creighton (1856–1930) to commemorate her husband, the historian and Church of England bishop Mandell Creighton (1843–1901). The first lecture was delivered on 4 October 1907 and has since been followed by annual events at the University. For The Creighton Century, I and my fellow editors – Jennifer Wallis and Jane Winters – chose ten lectures from the first 100 years of the series. Each lecture was introduced by a historian who was then teaching at the University of London. In addition to these ten lectures and commentaries our 2009 collection included the published version of Robert Evans’s 2007 Creighton Lecture, ‘The Creighton century: British historians and Europe, 1907–2007’.
In 2009 The Creighton Century was available only as a print publication. I am therefore delighted that the Institute of Historical Research (I.H.R.) and University of London Press are now reissuing the collection in July 2020 as a free open access edition, with this new joint foreword by myself and Jo Fox, the current director of the Institute.
After re-reading my original foreword, in preparation for writing these new remarks, my first reaction was to repeat everything that I wrote in 2009. The opinions and sentiments it contains certainly merit repetition. But re-reading the volume steadily moved my thoughts in a different direction, back to the ideals that animated Mandell and Louise Creighton and forward to the year 2020 and the unknowable beyond. In relation to the first, I started to think of the Creightons’ belief in the international importance of the study of history and the unshakeable commitment to history’s significance in national and public life. And as far as the second is concerned, while I need hardly remind present readers that 2020 is the year of Covid-19, it may be necessary to jog the memories of future ones. This is also a year of much else besides. It is assuredly a time when we are starting to reconsider the inherited values and ethics that have shaped the way in which we think about the past and write history.
Tempting as it is, I cannot – and must not – start to paraphrase the extraordinary richness of the eleven Creighton Lectures reprinted in this volume. Nor indeed the insightful commentaries by distinguished historians based in the colleges, schools and institutes of the University of London. But no one could surely object if I made an initial specific reference to Eric Hobsbawm’s 1993 lecture, ‘The present as history’, with its theme of writing the history of one’s own time. Both poignant and profound as a reflection on the twentieth century and, at the end, on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ideals it was supposed to embody, the lecture’s concluding broadening of perspective and Hobsbawm’s reflections on how history might be written in the future supplied signposts to be followed. I found the invitation to reflect on the subsequent thirty years just one of the multiple messages his lecture conveyed. It also made me wonder how he might have interpreted those years if he had been able to revisit and update the lecture.
The medievalist that I am cannot resist making reference to R. I. Moore’s lecture on the twelfth- and thirteenth-century war on heresy and the profound social, legal, political and cultural changes it brought about. Here is another case of a historian changing opinions over a life-time; Jinty Nelson makes this point in her commentary. The war, as Bob Moore says in a lecture at which I presided in 2004, can be seen as a case of the imposition from above of a set of ideological beliefs that led to the destruction of thousands of livelihoods and major political and religious change. He also comments that it had happened before and was to happen many times again, a reminder that we never neglect the seemingly remote past. Alongside these two lectures, and no matter what historical period they were dealing with, many others in this volume reflect on the use that the present they were writing about has made of the past. This is clearly there in the lectures given by Robert Evans, R. B. Haldane, R. W. Seton-Watson, Keith Thomas and Donald Coleman.
A foreword must be brief. But I must speculate on how Robert Evans might deliver his 2007 centenary lecture on British historians and Europe, which I heard, in these post-Brexit years. This lecture must certainly be required reading for anyone charged with responsibility for this country’s future. And when I re-read the other lectures, I can only reflect that R. H. Tawney’s has surely been more productive of constructive controversy than most and that Lucy Sutherland’s on eighteenth-century London radicalism is another one that must give food for thought in present times. And that in these times, when university and school history syllabuses and historical perspectives are becoming increasingly global, the lectures by Joseph Needham and Ian Nish – devoted respectively to Chinese and Japanese history – widen horizons in remarkable ways.
I will conclude by saying that, approximately twelve years after writing my first foreword, it has been an immensely stimulating experience to be invited to write a second one for this new edition of The Creighton Century. All the lectures seem just as ‘relevant’ as they were then. To read them in 2020 is every bit as thought-provoking as it was in 2008–9. I might even say that it has been more so, second time around. Alongside other recent experiences, I have been made to think about the history of my own times. A lot has changed since the Creighton centenary year of 2007. New values indicate that there are subjects which we would now want to be there in the first one hundred years. That they are not is ultimately a reflection on how the discipline continues to evolve and needs to change. All of this fully justifies the reissue of this volume. The breadth of historical vision that it brings together makes this collection required reading for all who are committed – as Louise and Mandell Creighton were – to the cause of history in national, public and international life.
Professor David Bates
Director, Institute of Historical Research, 2003–8
July 2020
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I am very grateful to David for agreeing to write a new foreword to this 2020 reissue of his edited collection The Creighton Century which was originally published by the Institute of Historical Research in 2009. David’s remarks are an eloquent reminder of how much has changed in little over a decade since the book’s publication, and how this informs re-readings of these eleven essays, delivered as Creighton Lectures at the University of London between 1913 and 2007. Equally eloquent is David’s appreciation of the value of these essays, in setting present events in historical context and preparing us for a challenging future.
Since the first publication of this collection the annual Creighton Lectures have continued, most recently at the I.H.R. The published version of Robert Evans’s 2007 centenary lecture, which opens this volume, included a listing of every Creighton Lecture from 1907. For this reissue we now bring this record up-to-date, with details of the most recent Creighton lecturers and their chosen subjects, beginning with Professor Evans in 2007 (see pp. 25–8).
The twelve Creighton Lectures delivered in and since 2007 encompass the medieval to the contemporary past, and survey histories of Britain, Europe, the former British empire and the wider world. They chart the actions of singular individuals alongside accounts of mass movements and regimes, the brutality of which continues to shock. Several of the lectures delivered since 2007 also engaged actively with questions of historical practice, methods and historiography – subjects that remain central to our work at the I.H.R. Two of these recent lectures were published in the Institute’s journal, Historical Research, while the ideas raised in others now find expression in some very important monographs by these extremely distinguished historians.
As David notes, the decade since publication of The Creighton Century has witnessed significant developments, not least how historians research, read and communicate about the past. A key driver here is the growth of digital publishing and the capacity for academic publishers – like the I.H.R. and University of London Press – to make many more of their titles available free as open access publications. It is in this format that the reissued Creighton Century now appears, and I hope this will allow new readers to discover and share these fascinating essays. On a more sombre note, the decade since the collection’s first publication has also seen the death of several of its lecturers and their commentators: Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012), F. M. L. Thompson (1925–2017), a predecessor of David’s and mine as director of the I.H.R., and Justin Champion (1960–2020) who was another great friend of the Institute and who will be very much missed.
This new edition of The Creighton Century appears, as David observes, in the midst of a global crisis that leaves many of us troubled for the future. Historians are rightly concerned about the implications for their practice and profession, and especially the research infrastructure needed to support future generations of scholars. The Institute of Historical Research is playing its part, with others, to limit the impact of this crisis as best it can. And, like the Creighton Lectures in 2007, the Institute does so nearing its own centenary in July 2021. We are currently preparing for a centenary year that will explore the ‘past, present and future’ of historical research, concluding in summer 2022. In The Creighton Century we have the judgment and insights of some superb historians, past and present. Like David, I am confident their example will also be taken on by today’s early career researchers, thanks in part to the greater availability of collections like this.
Professor Jo Fox
Director, Institute of Historical Research
July 2020