6
July 1910 A.D. English
Historian, Arthur Geoffrey Dickens,
Born
In 1949, Dickens was appointed
Professor of History at the University of Hull,
later becoming Deputy Principal and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, 1950-1953, and
Pro-Vice-Chancellor, 1959-1962. He took up the post of Professor of History at King's College London in 1962, where he remained until becoming Director of the Institute of
Historical Research (IHR) and Professor of History in the
University of London, 1967-1977. Dickens was also active in other bodies, including being
President of the Ecclesiastical
History Society, 1966-1968; a member of the Advisory
Council on Public Records, 1968-1976; an advisor to the Council on the Export
of Works of Art, 1968-1976; Secretary, Chairman and General Secretary of the
British National Committee of Historical Sciences, 1967-1979; Foreign Secretary
of the British Academy, 1969-1979; and
Vice-President of the British Record
Society, 1978-1980. Dickens enjoyed "a deep love affair
with Germany",[2] was a moving force in the
establishment of the German Historical Institute in London and was decorated by
the German government.[3] He died in London at the
age of 91.[1]
His book on the English Reformation was, for many years the standard text on the subject, relying as it did on
detailed examination of parish records.
Papers of Professor Dickens are held
by Senate House Library, University of London, and are available to be
consulted there.[4]
Bibliography
- Lübeck Diary. Victor Gollancz Ltd., London 1947
- The English Reformation, Batsford, 1964 ISBN 0-00-633064-9
- Lollards and Protestants in the
Diocese of York, 1959
- Thomas Cromwell and the English
Reformation, 1959
- Reformation and Society in
Sixteenth Century Europe, 1966
- The Counter Reformation, 1968
- The German Nation and Martin Luther, 1974
- The Age of Humanism and
Reformation, 1977
References
Telegraph
Obituary of Professor Arthur Geoffrey Dickens
Professor A G
Dickens
PROFESSOR ARTHUR DICKENS,
who has died aged 91, was his generation's leading English historian of the
Reformation, and for many years an important figure in Anglo-German scholarly
co-operation.
12:00AM
BST 02 Aug 2001
PROFESSOR ARTHUR DICKENS, who has died
aged 91, was his generation's leading English historian of the Reformation, and
for many years an important figure in Anglo-German scholarly co-operation.
With The English Reformation (1964), Dickens established a new benchmark
of excellence for surveys of the sort and set the agenda for teaching and
research in the field for the next 25 years.
Where earlier histories of the
Reformation were often arid and narrowly political, Dickens offered a rich and
nuanced account which took religious motivation seriously and emphasised the
preconditions of reformation, such as popular anticlericalism and the native
tradition of heresy, Lollardy.
Dickens was a life-long Protestant,
and though much of his early work was on medieval monasticism, he had little
understanding of, and even less sympathy for, the Middle Ages.
These attitudes coloured his
perceptions of the English Reformation, which was in his view the speedy
triumph of Gospel-Christianity over a jaded and unpopular religious system
which was collapsing under its own weight; 16th-century Catholicism was, he
considered, doomed to fail because it was un-English.
By the 1980s the tide had turned
against Dickens' reading of the Reformation, and the local reformation studies
which he had done so much to establish were making his views hard to defend.
Somewhat unfairly, "Dickensianism" became a code-word for a blinkered
and "Whiggish" account of the Reformation, which neglected both the
vigour of the old and the unpopularity of the new religions in Tudor England.
Uncowed, Dickens fought back in 1989
with an extensively revised edition of The
English Reformation. But he was unable to halt the establishment of a new
orthodoxy in university and school courses, in which his work featured as a
stance to challenge rather than a point of departure.
Arthur Geoffrey Dickens was born at
Hull on July 6 1910. His religious sensibilities and historical instincts were
formed early on by the Anglicanism he inherited from his paternal grandfather,
a High Tory and a churchwarden, and by the ardent primitive Methodism of his
mother's family.
Dickens was educated at Hymers
College, Hull, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied Modern
History and was deeply influenced by his tutor K B MacFarlane. He graduated
with a First in 1932, and the following year became a tutorial fellow in
History at Keble College. He remained there until 1940. Although he later
looked back on the period as one of "unrelenting toil", he accepted
an honorary fellowship at the college in 1971.
During the Second World War Dickens
served in the Royal Artillery, and at the end of the war was stationed as
British Press Officer in Lubeck - a Hanseatic town which reminded him of Hull.
The diary he kept there formed the basis for his first book, Lubeck Diary
(1947).
An ardent Yorkshireman, Dickens'
earliest historical publications concentrated on the impact of the Reformation
in the Tudor North. At MacFarlane's suggestion, he began as an historian of
Yorkshire Catholic Recusancy and of the region's monasteries.
But Dickens's interests eventually
shifted to more radical traditions, a move signalled by the publication in 1959
of Lollards and Protestants. Based on detailed and highly professional work on
the Northern archival sources - until then the preserve of antiquarians and
local historians - the book marked a new approach to English Reformation
studies, and established Dickens's reputation.
In 1949, he left Oxford for the G F
Grant Chair of History at the University of Hull. He was delighted to return to
the city in which he took a defensive pride - his grandfather had been chief
inspector of the Alexandra dock there - and wrote a guide to the East Riding, one
of his most unbuttoned and self-revealing books, which was published in 1954.
At Hull, Dickens threw himself into
the life of the university, playing a leading role in establishing a monograph
publications series, serving as Deputy Principal and Vice-Chancellor, and
helping to establish a University art collection.
He ran the History department from his
house in Cottingham, venturing briefly into the university each morning to deal
crisply with administrative chores before retreating to his study with an
elusive "I'll be seeing you soon".
But Dickens was a conscientious and
gifted teacher, winning the affection and loyalty of colleagues with
judiciously dispensed confidences.
In 1962, Dickens moved to King's
College London, and two years later published The English Reformation. He left King's in 1967 to become director
of the Institute of Historical Research and editor of its bulletin. With
control over one of the most influential historical journals, he became an
indispensable figure in every major enterprise in his field.
As such, he felt himself to be the
senior man, and though invariably kindly, his sense of eminence could be
startling, particularly later on in his life. On one occasion, chairing an
Historical Association lecture by a distinguished Tudor historian, Dickens
wound up the proceedings by declaring that he hadn't understood a word of the
lecture and was sure the audience hadn't either. Fortunately, he added, the
speaker had a train to catch so there would be no questions, and then, turning
to the lecturer, advised him to "come back another time, and give us
something simpler".
In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Dickens turned his attention from England to Europe in a series of best-selling
textbooks on the Renaissance and Reformation which presented continental
scholarship to a British audience.
A life-long Germanophile, he threw
himself in particular into promoting Anglo-German scholarly co-operation on
every level, and played a leading role in the establishment of the German
Historical Institute in London in 1968. His appointment as foreign secretary of
the British Academy in 1969 enabled him to strengthen these continental links;
he travelled widely and established many academic contacts, and in 1980 was
awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit by the West German
government.
Dickens' interest in Germany took his
historical work in a new direction. His Birkbeck Lectures for 1969-70,
published in 1974 as The German Nation
and Martin Luther, drew attention to the new social history of the German
Reformation, though he never undertook any primary research into the subject
himself.
Dickens went on working into his
seventies and eighties, producing a major collaborative survey of Reformation
historiography in 1985, and of Erasmus in 1994.
A man of wide culture, Dickens built
up and then sold a distinguished collection of Dutch Old Masters, replacing
them with a collection of 20th-century British paintings, most of which he
presented to the University of Hull in 1980.
He married, in 1936, Mollie Bygott.
She predeceased him in 1978. They had two sons.
New York Times Obituary
A. G. Dickens, 91, Who Offered A New
View of the Reformation
By
PAUL LEWIS
Published: August 13, 2001
A. G. Dickens, a noted British
historian of the Reformation who was among the first to play down the theological
disputes of this period in Europe and to emphasize broader social change
instead, died on July 31 in London. He was 91.
For Professor Dickens, the Reformation
was a European phenomenon in which new outlooks fostered a religious revolution
with roots going back hundreds of years. New methods of communication and
transport, the professor argued, allowed the ideas of the Reformation to
spread.
In his most important book, ''The
English Reformation'' (Batsford), first published in 1964, he wrote that in
England the rise of Protestantism ''demands to be considered within a long
temporal and wide geographic context'' extending far beyond Pope Clement VII's
refusal to grant Henry VIII a divorce.
For the reformers, he argued, the
church had taken a wrong turning centuries before, with the Emperor Constantine
allowing pagan superstitions to penetrate Christianity while the popes created
an imperial papacy that was rich and politically powerful but increasingly
bereft of spiritual authority.
An excellent review article of Mr. Dickens’ volume
is available at: A. G. Dickens and the Men of the Sixteenth Century
Thomas
E. Morrissey
No comments:
Post a Comment