John Bagnell Bury | |
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| Born | (1861-10-16)16 October 1861 County Monaghan, Ireland |
| Died | 1 June 1927(1927-06-01) (aged 65) Rome, Italy |
| Relatives | Robert Gregg Bury (brother),J. P. T. Bury (nephew) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | Trinity College Dublin |
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| Notable students | Steven Runciman,Norman Baynes |
John Bagnell BuryFBA (/ˈbjʊəri/; 16 October 1861 – 1 June 1927) was an Anglo-Irish[1][2] historian,classical scholar,Medieval Roman historian andphilologist. He objected to the label "Byzantinist" explicitly in the preface to the 1889 edition of hisLater Roman Empire. He wasErasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History atTrinity College Dublin (1893–1902), before beingRegius Professor of Modern History at theUniversity of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow ofKing's College, Cambridge from 1902 until his death.
Bury was born the son of Edward John Bury and Anna Rogers in 1861 inClontibret,County Monaghan, where his father was Rector of theAnglicanChurch of Ireland.[3] He was educated first by his parents and then atFoyle College inDerry. He studied classics atTrinity College Dublin, where he waselected a scholar in 1879, and graduated in 1882.
He was elected afellow ofTrinity College Dublin in 1885 at the age of 24. Also in that year, he married his second cousin Jane Bury, who assisted him in his work, notably with her chapter on Byzantine art in the History of the later Roman Empire (1889); they had one son. In 1893, he was appointed to theErasmus Smith's Chair of Modern History at Trinity College, which he held for nine years. In 1898 he was appointedRegius Professor of Greek, also at Trinity, a post he held simultaneously with his history professorship.[4] In late 1902 he becameRegius Professor of Modern History at theUniversity of Cambridge,[5] and early the following year he was elected a Professorial Fellow ofKing's College, Cambridge.[6]
At Cambridge, Bury became a mentor toSteven Runciman (the medievalist), who later commented that he had been Bury's "first, and only, student". At first, the reclusive Bury tried to brush him off; then, when Runciman mentioned that he could read Russian, Bury gave him a stack of Bulgarian articles to edit, and so their relationship began. Bury was the author of the first truly authoritative biography ofSaint Patrick (1905).
Bury remained at Cambridge until his death at the age of 65 inRome, where he took his annual retreat since 1918.[7] He is buried in theProtestant Cemetery in Rome.
He received the honorary degreeDoctor of Laws (LL.D.) from theUniversity of Glasgow in June 1901,[8] the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) from theUniversity of Aberdeen in 1905, and the honorary degreeDoctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from theUniversity of Oxford in October 1902, in connection with the tercentenary of theBodleian Library.[9]
His brother,Robert Gregg Bury, was an Irish clergyman, classicist, philologist, and a translator of the works ofPlato andSextus Empiricus into English.
Bury's writings, on subjects ranging fromancient Greece to the 19th-centurypapacy, are at once scholarly and accessible to the layman. His two works on thephilosophy of history elucidated theVictorian ideals of progress and rationality which undergirded his more specific histories. He also led a revival ofByzantine history (which he considered and explicitly called Roman history), which English-speaking historians, followingEdward Gibbon, had largely neglected. In 1886–88 he published a series of articles on theFrankish domination in Greece. In 1892 he was among the first contributors toKarl Krumbacher's journalByzantinische Zeitschrift.[10] He contributed to, and was himself the subject of, an article in the 1911Encyclopædia Britannica. WithFrank Adcock and S. A. Cook he editedThe Cambridge Ancient History, launched in 1919.[11]
In 1913, Bury wroteA History of Freedom of Thought, a book from thefreethinking perspective criticizingChristianity and theCatholic Church as being against reason.[12] In response,Hilaire Belloc wrotean essay exposing numerous historical inaccuracies in the book,[13] and accusing him of not doing original research, but simply "repeating what some other man of the same kind has said before him, and that other man is repeating something that was said beforehim."[14]
Bury's career shows his evolving thought process and his consideration of the discipline of history as a "science".[15][16] From his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge delivered on 26 January 1903[17][18] comes his public proclamation of history as a "science" and not as a branch of "literature". He stated:
I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.[19][20]
Bury's lecture continues by defending the claim that history is not literature, which in turn questions the need for a historian's narrative in the discussion of historical facts and essentially evokes the question: is a narrative necessary? But Bury describes his "science" by comparing it toLeopold von Ranke's idea of science and the German phrase that brought Ranke's ideas fame when he exclaimed "tell history as it happened" or "Ich will nur sagen wie es eigentlich gewesen ist." [I only want to say how it actually happened.] Bury's final thoughts during his lecture reiterate his previous statement with a cementing sentence that argues "...she [history] is herself simply a science, no less and no more".[21]
The Odes of Pindar
Rome
Greece
Philosophical
I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.
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