Making History

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92) was one of the founding fathers of the discipline of academic history in Britain, known to medievalists in particular on account of his multi-volume History of the Norman Conquest (1867–79). He was also known in his own time as an influential thinker on empire and federalism, as well as a fierce and acerbic critic of all things relating to history and politics. As his most famous quote ‘history is past politics, politics present history’ demonstrates, Freeman had a way of collapsing barriers of time and a gift for making his readers feel part of history rather than merely its student. Today he is regularly cited with respect to scholarly debates over British identity and historical method. In the thirty years since John Burrow and Arnaldo Momigliano first addressed it in the 1980s, the tension between Freeman’s attention to constitutional institutions on the one hand and racial character on the other has divided scholars. In the absence of a modern biography, however, gaining the full measure of Freeman’s thought has been difficult: his lifelong interests in architecture and antiquarianism in particular have been sidelined. This volume is the first attempt to bring Freeman the medievalist, political commentator, religious thinker, and student of architecture together. Freeman emerges from this analysis as a leading public intellectual of his age.