Haskins, Charles Homer (21 Dec. 1870-14 May 1937), historian and educator, was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, the son of George Washington Haskins, a teacher and college registrar, and Rachel McClintock. As a youth Haskins received a thorough classical education from his father and attended Allegheny College. He then transferred to the Johns Hopkins University, where he received the B.A. in 1887 and the Ph.D. (under the auspices of the Herbert Baxter Adams Seminar) in history in 1890 at age nineteen. His academic advancement was swift and sure. After serving as an instructor at Johns Hopkins in 1889, he moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he served first as instructor and assistant professor (1890-1891), and then as professor of European history from 1892 to 1902. In 1902 he moved to Harvard University, where he remained for the rest of his academic career, serving as professor until 1912, Gurney Professor of History and Political Science until 1928, and Henry Charles Lea Professor of Medieval History until 1931, when he retired as a professor emeritus. For more than half of these years, from 1908 to 1924, he also served as dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Haskins's related academic activities and the honors and distinctions he was accorded were as numerous as they were imposing. He helped found the American Council of Learned Societies and served as its chair from 1920 to 1926. He was president of the American Historical Association in 1922 and of the Mediaeval Academy of America (founded 1925) in 1926-1927. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, and was a corresponding member or fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society of the United Kingdom, and the Société des Antiquaires of France and of Normandy. His renown earned him no less than nine honorary doctoral degrees from institutions in five countries. Special honors were awarded by the governments of France (Officer of the Legion of Honor) and of Belgium (Commander of the Order of the Crown) in recognition of Haskins's single, and singular, foray into the world outside the academy. He served as an aide to President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference following World War I. Haskins headed up or served on advisory commissions dealing with issues concerning Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine, and the Saar. After his return to academic life he coauthored, with Robert Howard Lord, Some Problems of the Peace Conference (1920) recounting his experiences and his outlook. In the book Haskins defended the commission's work as an equitable solution to the problems of Franco-German relations and echoed Wilson's positions that continued American involvement and a vigorous League of Nations were vital for a lasting European peace. Haskins shaped and dominated the academic study of medieval history in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. He published extensively in two discrete but related fields, the history of the Normans and the cultural history of the Mediterranean world. His two earliest, and highly influential, books stemmed from his training in the Hopkins tradition of the study of institutions, The Normans in European History (1915) and Norman Institutions (1918). The latter contains still-standard analyses of aspects of judicial administration and of feudal custom in Norman lands, while the former, intended for a more general audience of students and the public at large, sought to place Norman enterprise in the wider context of the rapidly changing world of Europe as a whole in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Normans of Haskins's studies had gravitated not only to England and the British Isles, but also to the south, where in Sicily they encountered and were blended into the traditions of Latin Catholic, Byzantine Orthodox, and Muslim Arabic cultures. Haskins's own scholarship reflected a similar odyssey. His greatest productivity came in the 1920s, when in quick succession he published four seminal books, The Rise of Universities (1923), Studies in the History of Medieval Science (1924), The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), and Studies in Medieval Culture (1929). His priorities were to trace the dissemination of Greek and Arabic scientific and philosophical texts in the Latin West and to record the professionalization of learning in the schools and universities of Italy and France. Consciously or not, Haskins chose as his subjects for investigation those very processes of the development of scholarship and of specialized learned elites in twelfth century Europe that he both exemplified and stimulated in American higher education during his lifetime. Like so many other scholars of his generation and background, he was both familiar and comfortable with the classically modeled essay, and his Studies are not so much extended monographs as they are series of tightly structured essays integrated by a largeness of vision and command of an overall conceptual context. The other two books in this group of four, The Rise of Universities and The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, were less technical and were intended to reach a wider, general audience, an objective that was amply realized. They became, in fact, widely adopted texts for college courses in medieval civilization and retained their popularity into the 1960s. Even if no longer frequently assigned, these books still hold honored places in the bibliographies of the standard medieval and Western civilization textbooks of the 1980s and beyond. Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most famous, of Haskins's books was The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. The title, which is so familiar as to amount to a kind of cliche, was deliberately, and provocatively, chosen. Haskins challenged the then-current Burckhardtian orthodoxy that "Renaissance" was a postmedieval, indeed antimedieval, phenomenon beginning in fifteenth-century Italy and spread to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century. His thesis, vigorously argued and amply illustrated, was that a knowledge of the pre-Christian classics, the rise of systematic humanistic learning, and the creativity exemplified in literature and in art, were as characteristic, mutatis mutandis, of the twelfth century as of the later period. This one book caused some incautious medievalists to deny the existence of, or to misrepresent the nature of, the later Italian Renaissance; but at least this one book, more than any other, politely but firmly denuded the terms "medieval" and "the Middle Ages" of their pejorative connotations in general educated parlance. As dean, Haskins was instrumental in developing Harvard's eminence and national influence in graduate training. The production of a scrupulously researched and publishable dissertation became the norm for entry into an academic career in the arts and sciences. Disciplinary autonomy and professionalism also were goals that Haskins exemplified by his personal dedication to the growth of the American Historical Association and its series of annual reports. As teacher and scholar he had the rare distinction of achieving eminence in multiple fields. His long tenure as dean did not detract from, but rather coincided with, his most active publishing period. He was able to devote more attention to graduate students after leaving the deanship, and he trained an entire generation of specialists in English medieval history, the history of the papacy, Byzantine history, and the history of the classical tradition in the Middle Ages. They in turn honored him with a festschrift in 1929. Poor health forced Haskins's retirement at age sixty in 1931 and made it impossible for him to maintain his scholarly activities thereafter. He wished only to remain in Cambridge, where he died. In 1912 he had married Clare Allen; they had three children, one of whom, George Lee, became a distinguished scholar of the origins and development of the medieval English Parliament. 2 Despite his early retirement Haskins's accomplishments both as a scholar and an administrator were daunting. Along with historians George Sarton and Lynn Thorndike, he helped to establish the history of medieval science as a legitimate and significant field, and he introduced more than one generation of younger American medievalists to the mysteries and delights of research in French provincial and local archives. Haskins was as much at home with the paleographical and textual difficulties of Norman charters as with the conceptual obscurities of Latin translations of Arabic treatises on natural philosophy. If many of his own books are now more honored than read, it is because his interpretations have been incorporated as standard components of our understanding and portrayal of medieval society, or because more recent research has advanced our knowledge beyond his findings on the very bases of questions he asked and lines of inquiry he opened. Another testimony to Haskins's stature and legacy was the creation in the 1980s of the American-based Charles Homer Haskins Society, a large and active international community of scholars specializing in Viking, Anglo-Norman, and Angevin studies. The society holds an annual conference in Houston, Texas, and publishes both a newsletter and an annual volume of articles, the Haskins Society Journal. Haskins doubtless could not have asked for a more fitting memorial to his place in the development of humanistic teaching and scholarship in American higher education in the twentieth century. Michael Altschul. “Haskins, Charles Homer”; http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-00267.html; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. By permission of Oxford University Press. 3 .