Sir Herbert Butterfield (7 October 1900 – 20 July 1979) was an English historian and philosopher of history, who was Regius Professor of Modern History and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is remembered chiefly for a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and for his Origins of Modern Science (1949). Butterfield turned increasingly to historiography and man's developing view of the past. Butterfield was a devout Christian and reflected at length on Christian influences in historical perspectives. Butterfield thought that individual personalities were more important than great systems of government or economics in historical study. His Christian beliefs in personal sin, salvation and providence were a great influence in his writings, a fact he freely admitted. At the same time, Butterfield's early works emphasised the limits of a historian's moral conclusions, "If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance". Biography Butterfield was born on 7 October 1900 in Oxenhope, West Yorkshire, and was raised a devout Methodist, which he remained for life. Despite his humble origins, receiving his education at the Trade and Grammar School in Keighley, in 1919 he won a scholarship to study at Peterhouse, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1922, followed by an MA four years later. Butterfield was a fellow at Cambridge from 1928 to 1979 and in the 1950s, he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He was Master of Peterhouse (1955–1968), Vice-Chancellor of the University (1959–1961) and Regius Professor of Modern History (1963–1968). Butterfield served as editor of the Cambridge Historical Journal from 1938 to 1955 and was knighted in 1968. He married Edith Joyce Crawshaw in 1929 and had three children. He died on 20 July 1979. Work Butterfield's main interests were historiography, the history of science, 18th-century constitutional history, Christianity and history as well as the theory of international politics. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1965. As a deeply religious Protestant, Butterfield was highly concerned with religious issues, but he did not believe that historians could uncover the hand of God in history. At the height of the Cold War, he warned that conflicts between self-righteous value systems could be catastrophic: The Whig Interpretation of History Butterfield's book, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), became a