Herbert Butterfield

Herbert Butterfield
Young, clean-shaven man
Herbert Butterfield
Born(1900-10-07)7 October 1900
Oxenhope, England
Died20 July 1979(1979-07-20) (aged 78)
Sawston, England
Title
Spouse
Pamela Crawshaw
(m. 1929)
Academic background
Alma materPeterhouse, Cambridge
Influences
Academic work
Discipline
Sub-discipline
School or tradition
InstitutionsPeterhouse, Cambridge
Doctoral students
Notable works
  • The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)
  • The Origins of Modern Science (1949)
Notable ideasWhig history
Influenced

Sir Herbert Butterfield FBA (7 October 1900 – 20 July 1979) was an English historian and philosopher of history, who was Regius Professor of Modern History and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.[3] He is remembered chiefly for a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and for his Origins of Modern Science (1949). Butterfield turned increasingly to historiography and man's developing view of the past. Butterfield was a devout Christian and reflected at length on Christian influences in historical perspectives.

Butterfield thought that individual personalities were more important than great systems of government or economics in historical study. His Christian beliefs in personal sin, salvation and providence were a great influence in his writings, a fact he freely admitted. At the same time, Butterfield's early works emphasised the limits of a historian's moral conclusions, "If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance".

  1. ^ John D. Fair, Harold Temperley: A Scholar and Romantic in the Public Realm, University of Delaware Press, 1992, p. 11.
  2. ^ Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970 (2nd ed.), p. 85.
  3. ^ Haslam, Jonathan (15 July 2011). "The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield by Michael Bentley – review". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 July 2014.