Richard Southern

Sir Richard William Southern (8 February 1912 in Newcastle-upon-Tyne – 6 February 2001 in Oxford), who published under the name R. W. Southern, was a noted English medieval historian, based at the University of Oxford.

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 honors 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 20 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 considers Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages one of two best single-volume books on the Middle Ages written in the 20th century for inspiring a revolution in the study of the period. However, Southern declined to lead the revolution by forming a programmatic research institute. Cantor describes him in Arthurian terms, with a group of devotees (including Cantor) who surrounded their master following the publication of The Making of the Middle Ages. Like Arthurian legend, Southern's story does not have an entirely happy ending, and Cantor describes his sense of disappointment when Southern failed to live up to Cantor's expectations.

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