Dame Veronica Wedgwood, O.M.

Abstract Martin Wight presented this tribute to Veronica Wedgwood on the occasion of her receipt of an honorary doctorate in 1971. As Wight observed, she wrote about vast conflicts such as the Thirty Years War and the Great Rebellion as well as individual statesmen, including Oliver Cromwell, Cardinal Richelieu, and William the Silent. Wight pointed out that “Dame Veronica sees history as the school of moral judgment, an understanding of ourselves. For history shows every kind of person in every kind of situation, the variety of human achievement and suffering, the resilience and tenacity of the human mind.… She interprets the past, not to provide directives for the collective present, but as an education in the human heart. Wedgwood history is a gigantic Rubens canvas, full of detail harmoniously distributed. But when we decipher the great ceiling spread out above us, we have, as in reading all the best history, a dual and contradictory sensation. On the one hand, the past is a strange country, whose language is difficult to learn.… On the other hand, the past is a mirror in which we see our familiar features.… More prodigally than any living historian, Dame Veronica uses literature and the fine arts as ingredients of the necromancy by which she resurrects the dead.”