Hugh Trevor-Roper - Academic Controversies

Academic Controversies

Trevor-Roper was famous for his writing style (see above). Especially in his many reviews, he could be pitilessly sarcastic, devastating in his mockery. In his attack on Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History, he accused the eminent scholar of regarding himself as a Messiah complete with "the youthful Temptations; the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony".

For Trevor-Roper, the major themes of early modern Europe were those of intellectual vitality, religious quarrels and of divergence between Protestant and Catholic states, the latter being outpaced by the former economically, politically and constitutionally. European expansion overseas was incidental to these processes. In Trevor-Roper's view, one of the major themes of early modern Europe was that of expansion. By expansion, he meant overseas expansion in the form of colonies and intellectual expansion in the form of the rise of nationalism, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. In Trevor-Roper's view, the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were part of the reaction against growing doctrinal pluralism, and were ultimately traced back to the conflict between the rational worldview of such thinkers as Desiderius Erasmus and other humanists and the spiritual values of the Reformation.

Trevor-Roper argued that history should be understood as an art, not a science, and asserted that the key attribute of the successful historian was the power of imagination. For Trevor-Roper, history was full of contingency, and the story of the past was neither a continuous advance nor decline, but was rather resolved by accident and through the particular choices that particular individuals made in the time at question. Though Trevor-Roper often acknowledged the impact of social trends upon history, in his view, it was the actions of the individuals that made the difference. However, in his studies of early modern Europe, Trevor-Roper did not focus exclusively upon political history, but rather sought to examine the interaction between the political, intellectual, social and religious trends of the period. His preferred medium for expressing himself was the essay rather the book. In his essays in social history, written during the 1950s and '60s, Trevor-Roper was increasingly influenced by — though he never formally embraced the work of — the French Annales School, especially Fernand Braudel, and did much to introduce the work of the Annales school to the English-speaking world.