Four studies in the history of historiography by Herbert Butterfield
Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge
A broadcast version of the four Wiles Trust Lectures delivered before the Queen's University, Belfast, last month.
2-The Gottingen Professors
The beginnings of the modern method of historical study are usually ascribed to the German historians Barthold Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke. Keeping them ' as giants in the background of the story,' Professor Butterfield describes the work of some of their predecessors, a group of professors in the University of Gottingen, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ' In the field of history,' he suggests, ' it is perhaps not too much to say that, in the period we are now considering, a university, in a system of combined operations, achieved what amounts to a creative act.'