CLASSIC TEXTS Obscure, Significant Events: R. W. Southern and the Meaning of Scholarship John Jeffries Martin This essay is the memory of a scholar’s encounter as a young man with a book that changed his life: Richard W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages, first published in 1953. Through an autobiographical reflection on the reading of this book when he was a college student, the writer, who is not a medievalist, attempts to convey the postwar context at Oxford in which Southern crafted his text as well as the affinities Southern’s own scholarship, with its attention to the new sensibilities of the twelfth century, had to the changes taking place in academic culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By exploring the personal influence Southern’s writing had on him, the author seeks to reinforce Southern’s own view of scholarship and the life of the mind as powerful forces in the shaping of history. As Southern observed, ‘[t]he significant events are often the obscure ones, and the significant utterances are often those of men withdrawn from the world and speaking to very few’. Keywords: Richard W. Southern; St Anselm of Canterbury; The Abbey of Bec; Oxford University; Maurice Powicke; Sister Benedicta Ward My more practical neighbors are right to ask me, the professor next door, why the things I care about might matter—if ideas make a difference. I tell them it is impossible to know. But I do know. I know, because we can gather a sense of the urgent importance of ideas from those rare moments when the distinction, always tenuous, between the active and the Rethinking History Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 297 – 305 ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) ª 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13642520600649572