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Martin Wellings, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter. By C. T. McIntire. Pp. xxvi + 499. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. isbn 0 300 09807 3. £30, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 56, Issue 2, October 2005, Pages 785–789, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fli229
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A Quarter of a century after his death and three-quarters of a century after the publication of his best-known work, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900–79) remains a controversial figure among historians. For John Vincent, Butterfield was one of the two ‘great historians of the twentieth century in England’ (An Intelligent Person's Guide to History [London, 1995], p. 58; the other was Sir Lewis Namier); Noel Annan hailed him as ‘the most original historian of his generation’ (The Dons [London, 1999], pp. 265–6); J. M. Turner described him as ‘one of the great lay theologians’, in company with C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot (‘The Christian and the Study of History’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society 46 [1987], p. 12). In his biography of G. M. Trevelyan, however, David Cannadine dismisses Butterfield in scathing terms as a ‘giggling, chain-smoking iconoclast, who seemed to be permanently about thirty-five years old … [and who] … never really matured into a seriously productive scholar or a major historian’ (G. M. Trevelyan: A Life in History [London, 1992], p. 212). The trenchant and conflicting judgements of colleagues and of later historians which serve as an epigraph to Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter indicate the magnitude of the task undertaken by C. T. McIntire in writing an intellectual biography of this prolific and provocative character.
