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Once recalled only for The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and Christianity and History (1949), Sir Herbert Butterfield's contribution to western culture has undergone an astonishing revaluation over the past twenty years. What has been left out of this reappraisal is the man himself. Yet the force of Butterfield's writings is weakened without some knowledge of the man behind them: his temperament, contexts and personal torments. Previous authors have been unable to supply a rounded portrait for lack of available material, particularly a dearth of sources for the crucial period before the outbreak of war in 1939. Michael Bentley's original, startling 2011 biography draws on sources never seen before. They enable him to present a new Butterfield, one deeply troubled by self-doubt, driven by an urgent sexuality and plagued by an unending tension between history, science and God in a mind as hard and cynical as it was loving and charitable.
A distillation of the thought and research to which Herbert Butterfield devoted the last twenty years of his life to, this book, originally published in 1981, traces how differently people understood the relevance of their past and its connection with their religion. It examines ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia; the political perceptiveness of the Hittites; the Jewish sense of God in history, of promise and fulfilment; the classical achievement of scientific history; and the unique Chinese tradition of historical writing. The author explains the problems of the early Christians in relating their traditions of Jesus to their life and faith and the emergence, when Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, of a new historical understanding. The book then charts the gradual growth of a sceptical approach to recorded authority in Islam and Western Europe, the reconstruction of the past by deductive analysis of the surviving evidence and the secularisation of the eighteenth century.
Five essays on the tendency of modern historians to update other eras and on the need to recapture the concrete life of the past.
“The most original historian of his generation” That is how the celebrated British academic Noel Annan described Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979), a profound and prolific writer who made important contributions as both a public and academic historian. In this authoritative and accessible intellectual biography, Kenneth B. McIntyre explores the extraordinary range of Butterfield’s work. He shows why the small book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) achieved such large influence; Butterfield, he demonstrates, has profoundly shaped American and European historiography by highlighting the distortions that occur when historians interpret the past merely as steps along the way toward the glorious present. But McIntyre delves much deeper, examining everything from Butterfield’s lectures on history, historiography, and Christianity, to his warnings about the dangers of hubris in international affairs, to his essays on the origins of modern science, which basically created the modern discipline of the history of science. This latest volume in ISI Books’ acclaimed Library of Modern Thinkers helps us understand a prescient and insightful thinker who challenged dominant currents in history, historiography, international relations, and politics.
"The Historical Novel: An Essay" by Herbert Butterfield is a critical examination of the historical novel genre. Published in 1924, Butterfield's essay explores the relationship between historical fiction and historical accuracy, discussing how novels set in historical contexts engage with and represent the past. Butterfield, a renowned historian and scholar, offers insights into how historical novels contribute to our understanding of history and the challenges of blending fact with fiction. He addresses the role of the historical novel in shaping public perceptions of historical events and figures, and how authors balance narrative storytelling with historical fidelity. "The Historical Novel: An Essay" is valued for its scholarly analysis and its contribution to the study of historical fiction, providing readers and scholars with a deeper understanding of the genre's impact and significance.
International law’s turn to history in the Americas receives invigorated refreshment with Christopher Rossi’s adaptation of the insightful and inter-disciplinary teachings of the English School and Cambridge contextualists to problems of hemispheric methodology and historiography. Rossi sheds new light on abridgments of history and the propensity to construct and legitimize whiggish understandings of international law based on simplified tropes of liberal and postcolonial treatments of the Monroe Doctrine. Central to his story is the retelling of the Monroe Doctrine by its supreme early twentieth century interlocutor, Elihu Root and other like-minded internationalists. Rossi’s revival of whiggish international law cautions against the contemporary tendency to re-read history with both eyes cast on the ideological present as a justification for misperceived historical sequencing.
K. J. Popma, a teacher of classical languages and a special professor of Reformed philosophy at the universities of Groningen and Utrecht, wrote his book during the trying times of the Second World War. The work outlines a philosophy of history rooted in Scripture and takes the account provided by Scripture seriously, without eliminating its historical character, either by spiritualizing its message or by undercutting it through an appeal to science. It takes its cues from the Scriptural narrative: creation and fall, the tower of Babel, Abraham and Israel, Daniel’s Four Empires, and the principal division in world history, the coming of Christ. Popma’s fresh and challenging approach to history utilizes the perspective of the Calvinistic philosophy associated with Herman Dooyeweerd, but it does so in Popma’s unique and idiosyncratic way, and in a style that belies the learning that underlies it. Nor does one need to have any special acquaintance with the specifics of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy to profit from it. At the same time, the relation between history and theology is especially important – “the researcher who never took a peek in the workshop of theology will always be a bungler” (p. 85). "History is a unity, and a continuity—of the sacred and the secular, of the course of salvation history and secular history, of the here and the hereafter. Nor does it end at the resurrection from the dead. “Our earthly task continues, first in our task in heaven, presently in our task on the new earth. Thus, it is not true that our earthly task comes to an end. For heaven and earth belong together and our task never ends” (p. 116). So then, history is not something disconnected from eternity, but continues into eternity. There is a unity between heaven and earth, between culture here and now, and life in the renewed creation hereafter. The aim of this book is to point to the splendour of the structure that God has built, to history in its unity and course. He who learns to see something of that splendour will foster a burning interest for what has happened and is still happening and will happen. He will be afraid of nothing so much as the danger of shutting oneself up in a spiritual prison that makes it impossible to see the real history, even if such a prison displays the finest inscriptions over its entrance and is comfortably and even luxuriously furnished. Nor will he become discouraged when he discovers that history is full of injustice. For he knows that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will be satisfied" (p. 133).