He was elected a fellowofTrinity College Dublin in 1885 at the age of 24. Also in that year, he married his second cousin Jane Bury, who assisted him in his work, notably with her chapter on Byzantine art in the History of the later Roman empire (1889); they had one son. In 1893, he was appointed to the Erasmus Smith's Chair of Modern History at Trinity College, which he held for nine years. In 1898 he was appointed Regius Professor of Greek, also at Trinity, a post he held simultaneously with his history professorship.[4] In late 1902 he became Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.[5]
At Cambridge, Bury became a mentor to Steven Runciman (the medievalist), who later commented that he had been Bury's "first, and only, student". At first, the reclusive Bury tried to brush him off; then, when Runciman mentioned that he could read Russian, Bury gave him a stack of Bulgarian articles to edit, and so their relationship began. Bury was the author of the first truly authoritative biography of Saint Patrick (1905).
Bury remained at Cambridge until his death at the age of 65 in Rome, where he took his annual retreat since 1918.[6] He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
His brother, Robert Gregg Bury, was an Irish clergyman, classicist, philologist, and a translator of the works of Plato and Sextus Empiricus into English.
Bury's writings, on subjects ranging from ancient Greece to the 19th-century papacy, are at once scholarly and accessible to the layman. His two works on the philosophy of history elucidated the Victorian ideals of progress and rationality which undergirded his more specific histories. He also led a revival of Byzantine history (which he considered and explicitly called Roman history), which English-speaking historians, following Edward Gibbon, had largely neglected. In 1886–88 he published a series of articles on the Frankish domination in Greece. In 1892 he was among the first contributors to Karl Krumbacher's journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift.[9] He contributed to, and was himself the subject of, an article in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica. With Frank Adcock and S. A. Cook he edited The Cambridge Ancient History, launched in 1919.[10]
Bury's career shows his evolving thought process and his consideration of the discipline of history as a "science".[11][12] From his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge delivered on 26 January 1903[13][14] comes his public proclamation of history as a "science" and not as a branch of "literature". He stated:
I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.[15][16]
Bury's lecture continues by defending the claim that history is not literature, which in turn questions the need for a historian's narrative in the discussion of historical facts and essentially evokes the question: is a narrative necessary? But Bury describes his "science" by comparing it to Leopold von Ranke's idea of science and the German phrase that brought Ranke's ideas fame when he exclaimed "tell history as it happened" or "Ich will nur sagen wie es eigentlich gewesen ist." [I only want to say how it actually happened.] Bury's final thoughts during his lecture reiterate his previous statement with a cementing sentence that argues "...she [history] is herself simply a science, no less and no more".[17]
Some people speak as if we were not justified in rejecting a theological doctrine unless we can prove it false. But the burden of proof does not lie upon the rejecter. I remember a conversation in which, when some disrespectful remark was made about hell, a loyal friend of that establishment said triumphantly, "But, absurd as it may seem, you cannot disprove it." If you were told that in a certain planet revolving around Sirius there is a race of donkeys who speak the English language and spend their time in discussing eugenics, you could not disprove the statement, but would it, on that account, have any claim to be believed? Some minds would be prepared to accept it, if it were reiterated often enough, through the potent force of suggestion.[18]
^Doris S. Goldstein, "J.B. Bury's philosophy of history: a reappraisal." American Historical Review 82.4 (1977): 896-919. online
^Goldstein, Doris (October 1977). "J.B. Bury's Philosophy of history: A Reappraisal". The American Historical Review. 82 (4): 896–919. doi:10.1086/ahr/82.4.896. JSTOR1865117.
^
Bury, John Bagnell (1930). "The science of history". Selected Essays. CUP Archive. p. 9. Retrieved 1 April 2015. I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.
^
Stern, Fritz (1972). The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present. Random House. p. 214. ISBN0-394-71962-X.
^
Goldstein, Doris (October 1977). "J.B. Bury's Philosophy of history: A Reappraisal". The American Historical Review. 82 (4): 897 (896–919). doi:10.1086/ahr/82.4.896. JSTOR1865117.