Volume 33, Number 2 · February 13, 1986
The Right Historical Stuff
By Noel Annan
F.W. Maitland
by G.R. Elton
Yale University Press, 118 pp., $15.00
Frederic Maitland is arguably England's greatest professional historian. Before he died in 1906, aged fifty-six, he changed the way historians worked on English medieval history. Almost alone among the Victorians he put into practice what German scholars were doing. Not that he spent time on Historismus or the attack upon positivist history by the Hegelians. Maitland learned from Germany the lesson that the historian must get into the archives and read. But he must read with a critical mind and ask himself what the words in a document were intended centuries ago to mean: he must not take evidence at its face value.
Review, 4860 words
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