Richard William Southern

Richard William Southern was born on 8 February 1912 in Newcastle, England. A mediaeval historian, Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages is among the best writing on the period. Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford in 1933, he became Tutor of Mediaeval History at Balliol College in 1937. A soldier in the Second World War, he returned to Balliol in 1945, but was diagnosed with tuberculosis and convalesced for two years. Professor of Modern History at All Souls College in 1961, his final appointment was President of St John’s College in 1969.

Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, he was the recipient of many honorary degrees in the UK and the US. In 1987, he was awarded the Fondazion Internazionale Balzan’s Prize for mediaeval history. Noted works include Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970), Platonism, Scholastic Method, and the School of Chartres (1979), The Monks of Canterbury and the Murder of Archbishop Becket (1985), Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (1990), and Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, 2 vols. (1995, 2001).