Charles Warren Hollister

From Speculum 73 (1998): 952-954. © 1998, by The Medieval Academy of America.  Reprinted by permission.

Warren Hollister (born in Los Angeles on 2 November 1930, died in Santa Barbara on 14 September 1997) published his final article in Peritia 10 (1996): "The Rouen Riot and Conan's Leap." It typifies his vigorous style, penchant for entertaining while instructing, and ability to tease out varieties of meaning from a peculiar and puzzling event. Why did the future King Henry I defenestrate a fellow named Conan during the Rouen riot of 1090? Because, Hollister convinces the reader, Henry was a capable, responsible ruler devoted to making peace in Normandy and later in England after becoming king in 1100.

Warren's attention to the career of Henry I goes back to 1962, when the eminent David Douglas recommended him as Henry's biographer in the English Monarchs series, now in the hands of the Yale University Press. This book, long in the making, was delayed by the great Santa Barbara fire of 1990, in which, Warren wrote his editor Robert Baldock, "among our losses were the hard and soft disks and printout of my Henry I MS, my entire research library, and all my research note cards." Discouraged only briefly, Warren began writing his final draft of Henry I during his half year in Brittany (1994). As late as a week before he died, he declared that he would complete the biography by Christmas. Death intervened, but not (if we may be permitted) fatally, for his family, colleagues, and former students plan to finish the book and deliver it to his publishers as soon as possible.

Warren's lifework on Henry I has changed perceptions of that king forever. Long remembered for his unrestrained sexuality and his cruelty, Henry will now be understood (despite his undeniable faults) chiefly as a great peacemaker on both sides of the Channel. In some thirty articles, Warren proved over and again that Henry's administrative sophistication was unmatched in early-twelfth-century Europe.

Warren established the now standard view that Henry was one of the inventors of administrative kingship: government through standard bureaucratic forms, professional administrators, and a series of institutions linking localities to the center. Even more important, Warren bridged the conquest, both chronologically and geographically. He became internationally famous for studies that emphasized the interrelationship of England and Normandy, so helping create the field of Anglo-Norman history, now established and recognized on every continent save (presumably) Antarctica.

Before devoting himself to Henry I, Warren wrote extensively on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman military institutions. His Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions on the Eve of the Norman Conquest (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962), which won the Triennial Book Prize of the Conference on British Studies, and The Military Organization of Norman England (Oxford, Clarendon, 1965) established Warren as a young and brilliant student of both sides of the divide of the conquest in England. His choice of subjects was a courageous one. English historians had been debating the nature of military, governmental, and administrative institutions for a century, and by 1960 they had solved them to everyone's satisfaction. Warren's first book, on the fyrd, was a brave piece of scholarship by an as-yet-unknown American, challenging the work of decades of British scholars. Warren's entry into the debate was not welcomed by all, but eventually the good sense of his arguments and the clarity of his prose won him and his theories admirers and then friends.

Warren was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy in 1981. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Medieval Academy of Ireland; he was President of the North American Conference on British Studies, of the International Charles Homer Haskins Society, and of other organizations; he was a member of many more. His fellowships and grants included two Fulbrights, a Guggenheim, two ACLS fellowships, and a Borchard Research Fellowship to Brittany. He received the Triennial Prize and the Waiter D. Love Memorial Prize, and he was the youngest person ever (to date) to be named Faculty Research Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the highest award that the University of California faculty can bestow upon its peers.

Warren graduated with honors from Harvard in 1951, served in the United States Air Force during the Korean War, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1958. He went on immediately to teach at the University of California, Santa Barbara, his one and only home institution, first as an Instructor ("a rank," he wrote with typical ironic humor, "that has since been abolished on humanitarian grounds"), and then all the way up to, and past, the top of the University of California's arcane merit system. At the time of his official (though hardly actual) retirement in 1994 he was the most respected and highest ranked professor in the humanities at UCSB.

Warren was also a splendid generalist. His textbooks, The Making of England, now in its seventh edition, and Medieval Europe, just issued in its eighth edition, are the most frequently used undergraduate textbooks in America and have been translated into a variety of languages.

None of this quite conveys the sense of what one of his colleagues calls "The Hollister Touch." Warren wrote, and spoke, with an easy clarity that we all know is difficult to achieve, with a sure touch for just the right way to put what needs to be said, and without a trace of condescension.

Warren's teaching was no less effective than his research. As a teacher of undergraduates, he packed the largest auditoriums, and his classes were known as tough but direct, incisive, and deceptively entertaining. He exercised his lyrical talents by setting historical events to well-known tunes. His devotion to teaching won him the Vice Presidency for Teaching of the American Historical Association, a National Teaching Award from the Danforth Foundation, and the UCSB Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award.

But it is as a teacher of graduate students that Warren made a mark that will be indelible for a century. He trained three dozen doctoral students in rigorous and often exhausting seminars and (mirabile dictu) placed almost all who sought academic positions. Among his graduate students (a "UCSB School" or even "Mafia" was centered on Warren), many have written or are writing prosopographical and other studies of the Anglo-Norman realm that promise to reformulate scholarly views of how medieval government functioned, providing an understanding of how family interests and connections played out. Warren taught his students a new appreciation for the rich charter evidence of the realm. Where this evidence had traditionally been mined for constitutional and legal information, Warren taught them to look also at their lists of signatories and witnesses and to construct from these an intimate knowledge of Anglo-Norman administration.

Warren contributed greatly to professionalizing the work of medieval graduate students in America. His students were among the first to give papers regularly at conferences across America, to be invited to give papers in England, and to assume that publishing before getting their degrees was a matter of course. One of his former students wrote, "Warren also invited scores of famous historians to Santa Barbara, and he made them go out to dinner with us so that we would have those connections when we left graduate school."

Even as he looked forward to finishing Henry I, Warren was ready to enter the scholarly fray again. As Distinguished Wei Lun Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1996, Warren proposed simply doing away with medieval history, suggesting a new periodization of Western civilization: classical antiquity to A.D. 200; late antiquity, 200-1050; preindustrial Europe, 1050-1800; modern Europe, 1800-c. 2000; and finally the postmodern, postindustrial world.

One of Warren's dearest achievements was the flourishing of the Haskins Society, which he founded; it serves as a forum in which colleagues and graduate students from America meet scholars from Britain and Europe and present their work to a scholarly audience that can appreciate their efforts and provide them with criticism, helping them develop and refine their ideas.

Professor Hollister's other talents need at least to be mentioned: he was a musician who was a connoisseur of music of all periods and times and himself produced two shows; he formed one of the two best collections on the Oz books in the world. He is survived by his wife Edith, two sons, three grandchildren, and more than thirty Doktorkinder.

Respectfully submitted,
John Baldwin
Giles Constable
Paul Meyvaert
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Chair