I - THE PRESENT STATE OF HISTORY

Summary

The historian who is called upon to deliver the Wiles Lectures is invited not so much to write the history of his chosen period or subject as to reflect upon it. There are possibly still some who will regard such reflection as an historical perversion, if not the original historical sin, and regret the days of supposed innocence when the historian could gaze on all his works and find them good, before the serpent of ideological doubt had entered his paradise and tempted him to speculate on his own presuppositions and those of other historians. Some perhaps still look back nostalgically—though they might not put it in this way—to that fairytale world when all the historian had to do was to release the facts from their enchanted sleep in archive or record, blow off the dust, and waving his pen, like the wand of a fairy in a Maeterlinck play, bid them speak for themselves. ‘It is not I who write,’ declared Fustel de Coulanges in a well-known phrase, ‘but history which writes through me.’ So doubtless the professor in Lucky Jim believed when he lifted his telephone and intoned ‘History speaking’.

That happy time, if it ever existed, is over. It is now a platitude that history is made—of course not arbitrarily—by historians, and changes when they change and as their world changes. The process has often been a slow one and not easily perceptible, but there have also been periods of rapid change in the writing of history. I believe that the present may be such a period.