Charles Homer Haskins

Charles H. Haskins

Charles Homer Haskins (December 21, 1870 – May 14, 1937) was an American historian of the Middle Ages, and advisor to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He is America's first medieval historian.

Life and career

Haskins was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania.^[1] He was a prodigy, fluent in both Latin and Greek while still a young boy, taught by his father.^[1] He graduated from Johns Hopkins University at the age of 16, and then studied in Paris and Berlin.^[1] He received a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University and began teaching there before the age of 20.^[1] In 1890, he was appointed instructor at the University of Wisconsin, became a full professor in two years, and from 1892-1902 held the European history chair there.^[2] In 1902 he moved to Harvard University, where he taught until 1931.^[2]

Haskins became politically involved enough to become a close advisor of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, whom he had met at Johns Hopkins. When Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 where the Treaty of Versailles was drawn up, he brought only three advisors including Haskins, who served as chief of the Western European division of the American commission.

He was primarily a historian of institutions, like medieval universities and governments. His works reflect the mostly twentieth-century optimistic, liberal view that progressive government by "the best and brightest" is the way to go. His histories of medieval Europe's institutions stress the efficiency and successes of their governing bureaucracies, implicitly analogous to those of modern nation states.

Haskins's most well known pupil was medieval historian Joseph Strayer, who went on to teach many American medievalists of the next generation(s), some still active today.

The Haskins Society, named in his honor was organized in 1982, a "Founding Father" being the late C. Warren Hollister.^[3] It publishes an annual Journal whose volume 11 (2003) reconsidered Haskins' magnum opus seventy years after its publication.^[4] From 1920 to 1926, he was also the first chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies, which still offers a distinguished lecture series named after him.

His son George Haskins was a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor.

Renaissance of the Twelfth Century

Haskins' most famous work is The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927). The word "Renaissance," even to historians of the early 20th century, signified the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century as defined by 19th-century Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt in his "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy." Haskins opened a broader view when he asserted, The continuity of history rejects violent contrasts between successive periods, and modern research shows the Middle Ages less dark and less static, the Renaissance less bright and less sudden, than was once supposed. The Italian Renaissance was preceded by similar, if less wide-reaching, movements.

Haskins' fresh assessment of a sort of pre-renaissance, ushering in the High Middle Ages around 1070, was resisted by some scholars at first. His approach was broader than a mere literary revival: he found that the 12th century in Europe was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic art; the emergence of vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The twelfth century left its signature on higher education, on scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry... We shall confine ourselves to the Latin side of this renaissance, the revival of learning in the broadest sense—the Latin classics and their influence, the new jurisprudence and the more varied historiography, the new knowledge of the Greeks and Arabs and its effects upon western science and philosophy, as he stated in his preface.

Haskins focused on high culture to prove that the twelfth century was indeed a period of dynamic growth. He looked at the history of art and science, the universities, philosophy, architecture and literature, and provided a celebratory view of the period. More recent views of the renewal have expanded the focus; e.g.,.^[5] Once the ice had been broken, other scholars concentrated on an earlier, more constrained revival of learning in some circles under the patronage of Charlemagne, and began talking and thinking of a "Carolingian Renaissance" of the ninth century. By 1960, Erwin Panofsky could write of Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art.

Less wide-ranging were Haskins' earlier study of the Normans, Norman Institutions (1918), still the basis of our understanding how medieval Normandy functioned; and the more popular book The Normans in European History (1915).

Works

• The Yazoo Land Companies. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1891.
• A History of Higher Education in Pennsylvania. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902 (with William I. Hull).
• The Normans in European History. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1915.
• Norman Institutions. Harvard University Press, 1918.
• Some Problems of the Peace Conference. Harvard University Press, 1920 (with Robert Howard Lord).
• The Rise of Universities. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923.
• Studies in the History of Mediæval Science. Harvard University Press, 1924.
• The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Harvard University Press, 1927.
• Studies in Mediaeval Culture. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1958 (1st Pub. 1929).

Selected articles

Notes

External links

• Works by or about Charles Homer Haskins at Internet Archive
• "Charles Homer Haskins". In Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
• A brief analysis of Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century
• Haskins Society webpage
• A bibliography of the twelfth-century renaissance
• ACLS Charles Homer Haskins lecture series
• Norman Institutions (1918)