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Inventing the Middle Ages
The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century
In this ground-breaking work, Norman Cantor explains how our current notion of the Middle Ages-with its vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies-was born in the twentieth century. The medieval world was not simply excavated through systematic research. It had to be conceptually created: It had to be invented, and this is the story of that invention.
Norman Cantor focuses on the lives and works of twenty of the great medievalists of this century, demonstrating how the events of their lives, and their spiritual and emotional outlooks, influenced their interpretations of the Middle Ages. Cantor makes their scholarship an intensely personal and passionate exercise, full of color and controversy, displaying the strong personalities and creative minds that brought new insights about the past.
A revolution in academic method, this book is a breakthrough to a new way of teaching the humanities and historiography, to be enjoyed by student and general public alike. It takes an immense body of learning and transmits it so that readers come away fully informed of the essentials of the subject, perceiving the interconnection of medieval civilization with the culture of the twentieth century and having had a good time while doing it! This is a riveting, entertaining, humorous, and learned read, compulsory for anyone concerned about the past and future of Western civilization.
In this ground-breaking work, Norman Cantor explains how our current notion of the Middle Ages-with its vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies-was born in the twentieth century. The medieval world was not simply excavated through systematic research. It had to be conceptually created: It had to be invented, and this is the story of that invention.
Norman Cantor focuses on the lives and works of twenty of the great medievalists of this century, demonstrating how the events of their lives, and their spiritual and emotional outlooks, influenced their interpretations of the Middle Ages. Cantor makes their scholarship an intensely personal and passionate exercise, full of color and controversy, displaying the strong personalities and creative minds that brought new insights about the past.
A revolution in academic method, this book is a breakthrough to a new way of teaching the humanities and historiography, to be enjoyed by student and general public alike. It takes an immense body of learning and transmits it so that readers come away fully informed of the essentials of the subject, perceiving the interconnection of medieval civilization with the culture of the twentieth century and having had a good time while doing it! This is a riveting, entertaining, humorous, and learned read, compulsory for anyone concerned about the past and future of Western civilization.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
About the author
Norman F. Cantor
49 books82 followersBorn in Winnipeg, Canada, Cantor received his B.A. at the University of Manitoba in 1951. He went on to get his master's degree in 1953 from Princeton University and spent a year as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. He received his doctorate from Princeton in 1957 under the direction of the eminent medievalist Joseph R. Strayer.
After teaching at Princeton, Cantor moved to Columbia University from 1960 to 1966. He was a Leff professor at Brandeis University until 1970 and then was at SUNY Binghamton until 1976, when he took a position at University of Illinois at Chicago for two years. He then went on to New York University, where he was professor of history, sociology and comparative literature. After a brief stint as Fulbright Professor at the Tel Aviv University History Department (1987–88), he devoted himself to working as a full-time writer.
Although his early work focused on English religious and intellectual history, Cantor's later scholarly interests were far more diverse, and he found more success writing for a popular audience than he did engaging in more narrowly-focused original research. He did publish one monograph study, based on his graduate thesis, Church, kingship, and lay investiture in England, 1089-1135, which appeared in 1958 and remains an important contribution to the topic of church-state relations in medieval England. Throughout his career, however, Cantor preferred to write on the broad contours of Western history, and on the history of academic medieval studies in Europe and North America, in particular the lives and careers of eminent medievalists. His books generally received mixed reviews in academic journals, but were often popular bestsellers, buoyed by Cantor's fluid, often colloquial, writing style and his lively critiques of persons and ideas, both past and present. Cantor was intellectually conservative and expressed deep skepticism about what he saw as methodological fads, particularly Marxism and postmodernism, but also argued for greater inclusion of women and minorities in traditional historical narratives. In both his best-selling Inventing the Middle Ages and his autobiography, Inventing Norman Cantor, he reflected on his strained relationship over the years with other historians and with academia in general.
Upon retirement in 1999, Cantor moved to Miami, Florida, where he continued to work on several books up to the time of his death.
After teaching at Princeton, Cantor moved to Columbia University from 1960 to 1966. He was a Leff professor at Brandeis University until 1970 and then was at SUNY Binghamton until 1976, when he took a position at University of Illinois at Chicago for two years. He then went on to New York University, where he was professor of history, sociology and comparative literature. After a brief stint as Fulbright Professor at the Tel Aviv University History Department (1987–88), he devoted himself to working as a full-time writer.
Although his early work focused on English religious and intellectual history, Cantor's later scholarly interests were far more diverse, and he found more success writing for a popular audience than he did engaging in more narrowly-focused original research. He did publish one monograph study, based on his graduate thesis, Church, kingship, and lay investiture in England, 1089-1135, which appeared in 1958 and remains an important contribution to the topic of church-state relations in medieval England. Throughout his career, however, Cantor preferred to write on the broad contours of Western history, and on the history of academic medieval studies in Europe and North America, in particular the lives and careers of eminent medievalists. His books generally received mixed reviews in academic journals, but were often popular bestsellers, buoyed by Cantor's fluid, often colloquial, writing style and his lively critiques of persons and ideas, both past and present. Cantor was intellectually conservative and expressed deep skepticism about what he saw as methodological fads, particularly Marxism and postmodernism, but also argued for greater inclusion of women and minorities in traditional historical narratives. In both his best-selling Inventing the Middle Ages and his autobiography, Inventing Norman Cantor, he reflected on his strained relationship over the years with other historians and with academia in general.
Upon retirement in 1999, Cantor moved to Miami, Florida, where he continued to work on several books up to the time of his death.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
March 27, 2017
The Middle Ages as we perceive them are the creation of an interactive process in which accumulated learning, the resources and structures of the academic profession, the speculative comparing of medieval and modern worlds, and intellectualization through appropriation of modern theory of society, personality, language, and art have been molded together in the lives, work, and ideas of medievalists and the school and traditions they founded.
Whew! Thank goodness we don’t find too many sentences like that one in Norman Cantor’s 1991 Inventing the Middle Ages. Usually Cantor has a bit more fluid style.
But the sentence does explain, upon reflection, what the title of the book means. Cantor believes that in historiography, the historian, try as he might, cannot escape the present … that there is always some part of the historic past that is “invented” by the historian. This is not something to condemn the historian for, since it is unavoidable – but it is the reason why history should not be allowed to calcify from this invented wisdom into a received wisdom which is no longer reexamined.
The author
Norman Cantor (1929-2004) was a Canadian-born medieval historian. He was known for an engaging style, and authored many books that were widely read. One of the first books Cantor wrote, in 1963, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, is still in print in a revised edition. Though best known for his work in the medieval period, Cantor also published books on Alexander the Great and on Jewish history. Cantor held positions at several Universities during his career, including Princeton, Columbia, Brandeis, the University of Illinois, NYU (where in addition to lecturing he was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences), and Tel Aviv University.
Photo by Phil Gallo, from the book jacket
Throughout his career, Cantor was interested in writing for an audience more public than academic. Many of his books were well-received by this reading public, but more narrowly focused academic historians were from time to time on bad footing with him. In the book reviewed here, he occasionally reflects on some of these strained relationships.
In summarizing Cantor’s career, Wikipedia says, “His books generally received mixed reviews in academic journals, but were often popular bestsellers, buoyed by Cantor's fluid, often colloquial, writing style and his lively critiques of persons and ideas both past and present. He was intellectually conservative and expressed deep skepticism about what he saw as methodological fads, particularly Marxism and postmodernism, but he also argued for greater inclusion of women and minorities in traditional historical narratives.”
The book
This book is not about the Middle Ages, or even really about the invented idea of the Middle Ages which we may have in our own minds. It is, instead, about those who did the inventing. Cantor says in his preface
He starts off, in the first section of the book, talking about three popular creations of the recent past which were about, or set in, medieval times: Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 A Distant Mirror, the 1984 English translation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Donald Howard’s 1987 biography Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World.
So, who are the “master medievalists” who constructed this base upon which we envision the Middle Ages?
12
Allow me first to list twelve of them very briefly, in more or less chronological order. Frederick William Maitland (1850-1906), the father of English legal history, in the chapter Law and Society; Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937) and Joseph Reese Strayer (1904-1987) in the chapter American Pie; Marc Block (1886-1944), cofounder of the Annales School, and Louis Halphen (1880-1950) in The French Jews; Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956) and Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), in The Formalists; Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (1895-1963) and Percy Ernst Schramm (1894-1970) in The Nazi Twins; Michael David Knowles (1896-1974) and Etienne Henry Gilson (1884-1978) in After the Fall; and Richard William Southern (1912-2001) in The Once and Future King.
+ 5
To these Cantor adds, in a final chapter, The Outriders, five more: Theodor Ernst Mommsen (1807-1903), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902; Eileen Edna Power (1889-1940), a pioneering female medievalist who wrote Medieval English Nunneries and the posthumously published Medieval Women, among many other studies; Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), author of the monumental Waning of the Middle Ages; Carl Erdmann (1898-1945), medieval political historian who also wrote about the Crusades; and Michael Moissey Postan (1899-1981), a British medievalist specializing in economic history.
(= 17)
Before looking in a bit more detail at the final three, note that in each of his ten chapters, Cantor, for some unknown reason, possibly playfulness(?), constrains his narrative to fit into exactly four titled sections. Since the chapters deal with one, two, three or five medievalists, this no doubt presented him with an interesting problem: how does one structure what one wants to say about these historians into four separate topical sections? You will have to read the book to find out, for most of these chapters.
+ 3
Let’s now take a look at the chapter called The Oxford Fantasists, in which Cantor discusses the three medievalists I haven’t yet named: Frederick Maurice Powicke (1879-1963), Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963); and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973).
That’s right: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and some chap named Powicke.
The chapter’s first section, Save the Beloved Land, is about both Lewis and Tolkien. In it we learn of the Inklings, a group of Oxford dons who, in the early forties, “during the height of the war years, while a bomber moon shone down upon the deer park on the grounds of Magdalen College”, met in “Jack” Lewis’s rooms to drink beer and tea, smoke heavily “in the British manner”, and read manuscripts to each other. One of the Inklings was Tolkien, a renowned authority on Old and Middle English, whose academic career seemed on a downward trajectory. He had published a children’s fantasy, The Hobbit, but had not yet been able to produce a sequel. Lewis, on the other hand, was at this time England’s best known Christian polemicist. But Cantor is here mostly interested in the fantasy literature of both these men, it’s connection to their medieval knowledge, and the “profound and indelible” effect it has had on world culture.
Each of the remaining three sections of the chapter are chiefly devoted to a single one of Cantor’s three protagonists. The Medieval Imagination to Lewis; The Long Journey to Tolkien; and A Proustian Dreamworld to Powicke. The first two delve into similarities (and differences) between Lewis and Tolkien; and topics such as Tolkien’s multiple interpretations of his Lord of the Rings saga, especially in the context of medieval history, and Lewis’s views on medieval art, literature, and neo-Thomism. The Dreamworld section is the only one in which Powicke appears (though the other two appear again, in comparisons with the main character).
Powicke was the Oxford regius professor of modern history – a discipline that at Oxbridge in the 1940s still meant “after the fall of Rome A.D. 476”. Powicke, being forced into retirement at the age of sixty-seven, was still engaged in his enormous manuscript on the reign of Henry III. When he finally delivered it to OUP late that year, they were stunned. They had contracted with Powicke for an undergraduate survey textbook on the thirteenth century (1216-1307) of about 600 pages. What he delivered only reached to the year 1272, in 800 pages (with its “obsessively detailed” index it eventually resulted in 858); and what he had written was not a textbook. In Cantor’s words, it was a Proustian dream vision of the politics and culture of the high aristocracy in the thirteenth century, a work very difficult and far too long for undergraduates to read and too imaginative and avant-garde for most of the pedestrian medieval historians of postwar Britain to endure. Cantor goes on at some length about his comparison of Henry III to Proust, and to modernism in the novel. Very engaging stuff.
PS. OUP graciously published what he had submitted in a very handsome edition, then asked him again for the textbook. Cantor says he delivered it a few years later, and it was terrible. Filled with details about battles in obscure Welsh valleys, and saying next to nothing about the beginnings of Parliament.
= 20!
I found this volume to be extremely pleasurable reading, though it took me a while to get into it. The mix of biographical information, schools of medievalism, and foibles of the master medievalists is not only entertaining and informative, but provocative. Some readers may be a bit put off by Cantor’s personal judgements of the historians he covers, by perhaps an over light-hearted tone when discussing this or that aspect of a historian’s views. But there’s enough worthwhile historiography in the narrative to give occasion for thought to most readers, if they have an interest in Cantor’s topic – where the view we have of the Middle Ages came from, and what about it needs to be viewed with caution.
Whew! Thank goodness we don’t find too many sentences like that one in Norman Cantor’s 1991 Inventing the Middle Ages. Usually Cantor has a bit more fluid style.
But the sentence does explain, upon reflection, what the title of the book means. Cantor believes that in historiography, the historian, try as he might, cannot escape the present … that there is always some part of the historic past that is “invented” by the historian. This is not something to condemn the historian for, since it is unavoidable – but it is the reason why history should not be allowed to calcify from this invented wisdom into a received wisdom which is no longer reexamined.
The author
Norman Cantor (1929-2004) was a Canadian-born medieval historian. He was known for an engaging style, and authored many books that were widely read. One of the first books Cantor wrote, in 1963, The Civilization of the Middle Ages, is still in print in a revised edition. Though best known for his work in the medieval period, Cantor also published books on Alexander the Great and on Jewish history. Cantor held positions at several Universities during his career, including Princeton, Columbia, Brandeis, the University of Illinois, NYU (where in addition to lecturing he was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences), and Tel Aviv University.
Photo by Phil Gallo, from the book jacket
Throughout his career, Cantor was interested in writing for an audience more public than academic. Many of his books were well-received by this reading public, but more narrowly focused academic historians were from time to time on bad footing with him. In the book reviewed here, he occasionally reflects on some of these strained relationships.
In summarizing Cantor’s career, Wikipedia says, “His books generally received mixed reviews in academic journals, but were often popular bestsellers, buoyed by Cantor's fluid, often colloquial, writing style and his lively critiques of persons and ideas both past and present. He was intellectually conservative and expressed deep skepticism about what he saw as methodological fads, particularly Marxism and postmodernism, but he also argued for greater inclusion of women and minorities in traditional historical narratives.”
The book
This book is not about the Middle Ages, or even really about the invented idea of the Middle Ages which we may have in our own minds. It is, instead, about those who did the inventing. Cantor says in his preface
This book is the story of the founding era of medieval studies from 1895 to about 1965, through the lives, works, and ideas of the great medievalists, and is an evaluation of their continuing impact, into the 1980s, on how the European Middle Ages are interpreted.This is not to say, of course, that there is nothing about the ideas being assessed. Naturally Cantor explains the main body of work that each of his subjects has contributed to our view of the Medieval world, as well as offering an assessment of it.
From my own personal acquaintance with seven of the twenty master medievalists on whom this book is primarily focused, from a variety of biographical and autobiographical sources, as well as from accounts passed along to me, I have tried to construct in each instance a life narrative along with an assessment of ideas and an analysis of the continuing impact of these medievalists’ interpretations.
He starts off, in the first section of the book, talking about three popular creations of the recent past which were about, or set in, medieval times: Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 A Distant Mirror, the 1984 English translation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Donald Howard’s 1987 biography Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World.
Barbara Tuchman never had more than a B.A. from Radcliffe College and was proud of being a self-taught, nonacademic historian. Eco and Howard were literature professors at major universities. But in all three instances their popular books were based not only on their own reading and research but also on the vast corpus of mainline scholarly work in the twentieth century on the European Middle Ages. Much of this scholarly work is too technical to be accessible to the general college-educated reader. But it is the base upon which highly readable accounts of the medieval world are constructed.
So, who are the “master medievalists” who constructed this base upon which we envision the Middle Ages?
12
Allow me first to list twelve of them very briefly, in more or less chronological order. Frederick William Maitland (1850-1906), the father of English legal history, in the chapter Law and Society; Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937) and Joseph Reese Strayer (1904-1987) in the chapter American Pie; Marc Block (1886-1944), cofounder of the Annales School, and Louis Halphen (1880-1950) in The French Jews; Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956) and Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), in The Formalists; Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (1895-1963) and Percy Ernst Schramm (1894-1970) in The Nazi Twins; Michael David Knowles (1896-1974) and Etienne Henry Gilson (1884-1978) in After the Fall; and Richard William Southern (1912-2001) in The Once and Future King.
+ 5
To these Cantor adds, in a final chapter, The Outriders, five more: Theodor Ernst Mommsen (1807-1903), who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1902; Eileen Edna Power (1889-1940), a pioneering female medievalist who wrote Medieval English Nunneries and the posthumously published Medieval Women, among many other studies; Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), author of the monumental Waning of the Middle Ages; Carl Erdmann (1898-1945), medieval political historian who also wrote about the Crusades; and Michael Moissey Postan (1899-1981), a British medievalist specializing in economic history.
(= 17)
Before looking in a bit more detail at the final three, note that in each of his ten chapters, Cantor, for some unknown reason, possibly playfulness(?), constrains his narrative to fit into exactly four titled sections. Since the chapters deal with one, two, three or five medievalists, this no doubt presented him with an interesting problem: how does one structure what one wants to say about these historians into four separate topical sections? You will have to read the book to find out, for most of these chapters.
+ 3
Let’s now take a look at the chapter called The Oxford Fantasists, in which Cantor discusses the three medievalists I haven’t yet named: Frederick Maurice Powicke (1879-1963), Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963); and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973).
That’s right: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and some chap named Powicke.
The chapter’s first section, Save the Beloved Land, is about both Lewis and Tolkien. In it we learn of the Inklings, a group of Oxford dons who, in the early forties, “during the height of the war years, while a bomber moon shone down upon the deer park on the grounds of Magdalen College”, met in “Jack” Lewis’s rooms to drink beer and tea, smoke heavily “in the British manner”, and read manuscripts to each other. One of the Inklings was Tolkien, a renowned authority on Old and Middle English, whose academic career seemed on a downward trajectory. He had published a children’s fantasy, The Hobbit, but had not yet been able to produce a sequel. Lewis, on the other hand, was at this time England’s best known Christian polemicist. But Cantor is here mostly interested in the fantasy literature of both these men, it’s connection to their medieval knowledge, and the “profound and indelible” effect it has had on world culture.
Each of the remaining three sections of the chapter are chiefly devoted to a single one of Cantor’s three protagonists. The Medieval Imagination to Lewis; The Long Journey to Tolkien; and A Proustian Dreamworld to Powicke. The first two delve into similarities (and differences) between Lewis and Tolkien; and topics such as Tolkien’s multiple interpretations of his Lord of the Rings saga, especially in the context of medieval history, and Lewis’s views on medieval art, literature, and neo-Thomism. The Dreamworld section is the only one in which Powicke appears (though the other two appear again, in comparisons with the main character).
Powicke was the Oxford regius professor of modern history – a discipline that at Oxbridge in the 1940s still meant “after the fall of Rome A.D. 476”. Powicke, being forced into retirement at the age of sixty-seven, was still engaged in his enormous manuscript on the reign of Henry III. When he finally delivered it to OUP late that year, they were stunned. They had contracted with Powicke for an undergraduate survey textbook on the thirteenth century (1216-1307) of about 600 pages. What he delivered only reached to the year 1272, in 800 pages (with its “obsessively detailed” index it eventually resulted in 858); and what he had written was not a textbook. In Cantor’s words, it was a Proustian dream vision of the politics and culture of the high aristocracy in the thirteenth century, a work very difficult and far too long for undergraduates to read and too imaginative and avant-garde for most of the pedestrian medieval historians of postwar Britain to endure. Cantor goes on at some length about his comparison of Henry III to Proust, and to modernism in the novel. Very engaging stuff.
PS. OUP graciously published what he had submitted in a very handsome edition, then asked him again for the textbook. Cantor says he delivered it a few years later, and it was terrible. Filled with details about battles in obscure Welsh valleys, and saying next to nothing about the beginnings of Parliament.
= 20!
I found this volume to be extremely pleasurable reading, though it took me a while to get into it. The mix of biographical information, schools of medievalism, and foibles of the master medievalists is not only entertaining and informative, but provocative. Some readers may be a bit put off by Cantor’s personal judgements of the historians he covers, by perhaps an over light-hearted tone when discussing this or that aspect of a historian’s views. But there’s enough worthwhile historiography in the narrative to give occasion for thought to most readers, if they have an interest in Cantor’s topic – where the view we have of the Middle Ages came from, and what about it needs to be viewed with caution.
May 10, 2011
Having finished this book, I've sat and pondered for a while how best to describe Norman Cantor. Bitter? Egotistical? Historiographically wrongheaded? A raging douchebag? All those terms alone seem somewhat inadequate—perhaps some combination of all of them, with maybe a couple more thrown in.
When I came across this book in a secondhand bookstore, I knew I'd heard of it vaguely before, and the premise sounded very interesting—an exploration of the lives of some key twentieth century historians of the medieval period, examining their contribution to medieval studies and the historiographical context in which they wrote. I wanted to learn more about the history of the field in which I worked, and hey, it was only $3. (If only I'd mentioned the name to a professor of mine before I shelled out those three bucks—she practically spat on hearing the title. I could have spent the money on something else.)
I will not say that there's nothing useful in this book—I learned some things I hadn't known before, and have a much better sense of the connections between some key figures in the field. However, this is such a nasty, mean-spirited piece of work—a scorched-earth assessment of his colleagues which loudly trumpets Cantor's own intellectual superiority but which displays only a real inferiority of mind. Cantor was a Princeton grad and a Rhodes Scholar, but seemed to fancy himself as an establishment outsider, out to get back at The Man with Inventing the Middle Ages. The resulting book is a hatchet job which relies on dubious evidence and spurious attempts at understanding scholars' writing through incoherent psychoanalysis. Cantor seemingly despises historians of women's, Jewish, Islamic or African-American history—they are partisan ideologues, he declares, incapable of doing good work. (For white heterosexual male scholars, of course, can never engage in identity politics.) Only one female historian appears among the 27 discussed here, and even then Eileen Power is confined to a few pages in the last chapter, headed 'Outriders.'
Cantor's contextualisation of medieval history for the general reader does not make this book worth reading (it's often incorrect or woefully outdated; he clung to a conservative historiography long after it had been demonstrated to be false), nor does his turgid, adjective-laden prose. (If I had a nickel for every time he talked about a historian from Paris as a 'French mandarin', I'd probably recoup the cost of this book.) Even the bibliography at the end of 125 core books for anyone with an interest in medieval studies is laden with picks that are outdated or bizarre—what on earth is Barbara Tuchman's work doing there? Not to mention that, despite Cantor's lofty reassurances that this list has been double-checked against Princeton's (well!) own card catalogue, the reader is directed towards the work of Henri 'Pierenne', while Dáibhí Ó Cróinín becomes Dalbhi O. Cronin.
By the end, I was quite glad to see that Cantor was dismissive—actually downright offensive—about the founder of my own particular doctoral lineage. Praise from Cantor, I fear, would have been quite the indictment against his scholarship. A nasty, sneering, condescending work. Avoid.
When I came across this book in a secondhand bookstore, I knew I'd heard of it vaguely before, and the premise sounded very interesting—an exploration of the lives of some key twentieth century historians of the medieval period, examining their contribution to medieval studies and the historiographical context in which they wrote. I wanted to learn more about the history of the field in which I worked, and hey, it was only $3. (If only I'd mentioned the name to a professor of mine before I shelled out those three bucks—she practically spat on hearing the title. I could have spent the money on something else.)
I will not say that there's nothing useful in this book—I learned some things I hadn't known before, and have a much better sense of the connections between some key figures in the field. However, this is such a nasty, mean-spirited piece of work—a scorched-earth assessment of his colleagues which loudly trumpets Cantor's own intellectual superiority but which displays only a real inferiority of mind. Cantor was a Princeton grad and a Rhodes Scholar, but seemed to fancy himself as an establishment outsider, out to get back at The Man with Inventing the Middle Ages. The resulting book is a hatchet job which relies on dubious evidence and spurious attempts at understanding scholars' writing through incoherent psychoanalysis. Cantor seemingly despises historians of women's, Jewish, Islamic or African-American history—they are partisan ideologues, he declares, incapable of doing good work. (For white heterosexual male scholars, of course, can never engage in identity politics.) Only one female historian appears among the 27 discussed here, and even then Eileen Power is confined to a few pages in the last chapter, headed 'Outriders.'
Cantor's contextualisation of medieval history for the general reader does not make this book worth reading (it's often incorrect or woefully outdated; he clung to a conservative historiography long after it had been demonstrated to be false), nor does his turgid, adjective-laden prose. (If I had a nickel for every time he talked about a historian from Paris as a 'French mandarin', I'd probably recoup the cost of this book.) Even the bibliography at the end of 125 core books for anyone with an interest in medieval studies is laden with picks that are outdated or bizarre—what on earth is Barbara Tuchman's work doing there? Not to mention that, despite Cantor's lofty reassurances that this list has been double-checked against Princeton's (well!) own card catalogue, the reader is directed towards the work of Henri 'Pierenne', while Dáibhí Ó Cróinín becomes Dalbhi O. Cronin.
By the end, I was quite glad to see that Cantor was dismissive—actually downright offensive—about the founder of my own particular doctoral lineage. Praise from Cantor, I fear, would have been quite the indictment against his scholarship. A nasty, sneering, condescending work. Avoid.
August 21, 2014
Ah-HAH! Now I understand why this is important to lover's of fantasy. Cantor's discussion of C.S. "Jack" Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien (Ronald) ....(could that be as in "Weasly?").
I dare say Cantor probably would not appriciate or invite as close an inspection of his personal life as he gives C.S. Lewis, accurate or not. I don't disagree with a thing he said, but he has difficulty loosing the snobbish tone he picks others apart with and I wonder if his inclusion of these two is more for noteriety, so he can sell his book, than a serious argument about the encroachment of Conservative Christian values into United States Culture through Medieval Fantasy Novels.
Don't get me wrong, he's absolutely right about them. I just think he could have been less condescending. Lewis must have pissed on his porridge when he was a young lad. I'm sure after the exensive research he has done on Block and other mideval historians he understands how a casual comment, even if true, can ruin a sound and legitimate message that is also true buy savaging the messenger.
At any rate, it could have been worse. He's not completely disrespectful and, it seems he did try to give them credit for being actual medieval historians first and writers by devotion. I did find the story about how Lewis became a semi-willing semi aware tool of the conservative Christian Movement in England interesting, and, already known. He saw Tolkien as not so willing a tool, as a vessel with a similar message, either that or too lazy and mediocre for the Christian right to want him as their messenger.
So the saga continues and the message is either, "All these guys who came before me, between 1900 and the present gave views of medieval history that was coloured by their life experiences and not so much reflective of the values of Culture in the middle ages," or, "If I'm right, then you can't even trust my opinion because it's been coloured by my life experiences and has been projected on the Middle Ages too, just like everyone else."
To be less cynical, the value here is that he has looked at their lives and what they wrote and believed in (based upon letters and speeches etc.) and absolutely, they have transfered some of there values on the Middle Ages then broadcast them to the Western World. I'm not sure that's news, but now, rather than "supposing" it is this way Candor has mapped it out for us. I still wonder how this would feel if someone applied to him, the process he has applied to them.
In some cases, I'm not sure his compassion is well placed, in others, i believe his compassion might have been more warranted than his scorn.
It's important to know the values of the historian to interpret his work and this tells us those things, and, since that's kind of a "no-brainer" (of course thier life experiences colour how they view the world) and, this is probably true of everyone, even Cantor, I'm not sure the contempt is well served. Facts are facts, even when served on a nuetral plate, at least without the side of concieted kechup.
There are some revalations in here for me. Perhaps not so much revalations as moments where what I should have known or suspected all along was revealed as a truth. Some of this is just Cantor telling us that these things happened and offering little proof (which he accuses others whom he writes about as doing to the Middle Ages). That doesn't mean that they aren't accurate though it may be playing on something that has earned almost religoius belief status without ever being proved and therefor may not be true.
Specifically that the many pre-WWII scholars, particulalry the French, were Marxist or socialist and that is why they tended to play up the role of the peasant and vilify the role of the Church and the Aristocracy in the middle ages. I also found it particulaly interesting how much credit Cantor gives to the almost culturally conceded belief that Midevial Historian books written about Otto and Fredrich some how set the stage enabling Hitler to take control of Germany. That did put int context what Cantor wrote about how that affected any opinion given credence or using the schools of thought that lead to that and how that affected anyone even mentioning iconology in conjunction with artistic expression in the Middle Ages. We can't talk about a messianic figure any more, or everyone will freak out and adopt the next hitler.
According to Cantor, McCarthy was right. There were Scholarly Socialists under every Acedemic rock and lurking in the shadows, poisoning our young and impressionable adults with the glorifacation of the middle class and peasants. I'm reasonably sure Cantor's candor is accurate about how Mideval Historians saw themselves and their role in the world (including Candors) and equally certain that the influence of Acedemics in real world has not been nearly as profound as he believes they are.
All things need a frame to judge their purportions correctly and how much influence on the world they really have. Hitler would have taken power without "Freidrich II" having a book written about him and the socialism and marxism that candor spoke about is more along the lines of Arthur Blair's Democratic Socialists and very different from Stalinist Soviets. And, again, it is likely these are accurate assessments in content, if not in importance to the bigger picture of the world, but, this makes a dash of salt seem like a "spoonful of sugar," and he ain't exactly" Marry Poppins full of sunshine" in the way he explains things.
So I rate it as 3 stars, because I think the author gets caught up in his own importance, and the importance of those he'w writing about more than is good for us. I also think it's an important book, because it "says" what we al have suspectef for years. At somepoint, somebody does need ot say it... so, try not to shoot the messenger. Darn, I pulled a Cantor and told you to not do that which I have already done.
I dare say Cantor probably would not appriciate or invite as close an inspection of his personal life as he gives C.S. Lewis, accurate or not. I don't disagree with a thing he said, but he has difficulty loosing the snobbish tone he picks others apart with and I wonder if his inclusion of these two is more for noteriety, so he can sell his book, than a serious argument about the encroachment of Conservative Christian values into United States Culture through Medieval Fantasy Novels.
Don't get me wrong, he's absolutely right about them. I just think he could have been less condescending. Lewis must have pissed on his porridge when he was a young lad. I'm sure after the exensive research he has done on Block and other mideval historians he understands how a casual comment, even if true, can ruin a sound and legitimate message that is also true buy savaging the messenger.
At any rate, it could have been worse. He's not completely disrespectful and, it seems he did try to give them credit for being actual medieval historians first and writers by devotion. I did find the story about how Lewis became a semi-willing semi aware tool of the conservative Christian Movement in England interesting, and, already known. He saw Tolkien as not so willing a tool, as a vessel with a similar message, either that or too lazy and mediocre for the Christian right to want him as their messenger.
So the saga continues and the message is either, "All these guys who came before me, between 1900 and the present gave views of medieval history that was coloured by their life experiences and not so much reflective of the values of Culture in the middle ages," or, "If I'm right, then you can't even trust my opinion because it's been coloured by my life experiences and has been projected on the Middle Ages too, just like everyone else."
To be less cynical, the value here is that he has looked at their lives and what they wrote and believed in (based upon letters and speeches etc.) and absolutely, they have transfered some of there values on the Middle Ages then broadcast them to the Western World. I'm not sure that's news, but now, rather than "supposing" it is this way Candor has mapped it out for us. I still wonder how this would feel if someone applied to him, the process he has applied to them.
In some cases, I'm not sure his compassion is well placed, in others, i believe his compassion might have been more warranted than his scorn.
It's important to know the values of the historian to interpret his work and this tells us those things, and, since that's kind of a "no-brainer" (of course thier life experiences colour how they view the world) and, this is probably true of everyone, even Cantor, I'm not sure the contempt is well served. Facts are facts, even when served on a nuetral plate, at least without the side of concieted kechup.
There are some revalations in here for me. Perhaps not so much revalations as moments where what I should have known or suspected all along was revealed as a truth. Some of this is just Cantor telling us that these things happened and offering little proof (which he accuses others whom he writes about as doing to the Middle Ages). That doesn't mean that they aren't accurate though it may be playing on something that has earned almost religoius belief status without ever being proved and therefor may not be true.
Specifically that the many pre-WWII scholars, particulalry the French, were Marxist or socialist and that is why they tended to play up the role of the peasant and vilify the role of the Church and the Aristocracy in the middle ages. I also found it particulaly interesting how much credit Cantor gives to the almost culturally conceded belief that Midevial Historian books written about Otto and Fredrich some how set the stage enabling Hitler to take control of Germany. That did put int context what Cantor wrote about how that affected any opinion given credence or using the schools of thought that lead to that and how that affected anyone even mentioning iconology in conjunction with artistic expression in the Middle Ages. We can't talk about a messianic figure any more, or everyone will freak out and adopt the next hitler.
According to Cantor, McCarthy was right. There were Scholarly Socialists under every Acedemic rock and lurking in the shadows, poisoning our young and impressionable adults with the glorifacation of the middle class and peasants. I'm reasonably sure Cantor's candor is accurate about how Mideval Historians saw themselves and their role in the world (including Candors) and equally certain that the influence of Acedemics in real world has not been nearly as profound as he believes they are.
All things need a frame to judge their purportions correctly and how much influence on the world they really have. Hitler would have taken power without "Freidrich II" having a book written about him and the socialism and marxism that candor spoke about is more along the lines of Arthur Blair's Democratic Socialists and very different from Stalinist Soviets. And, again, it is likely these are accurate assessments in content, if not in importance to the bigger picture of the world, but, this makes a dash of salt seem like a "spoonful of sugar," and he ain't exactly" Marry Poppins full of sunshine" in the way he explains things.
So I rate it as 3 stars, because I think the author gets caught up in his own importance, and the importance of those he'w writing about more than is good for us. I also think it's an important book, because it "says" what we al have suspectef for years. At somepoint, somebody does need ot say it... so, try not to shoot the messenger. Darn, I pulled a Cantor and told you to not do that which I have already done.
May 24, 2012
This is probably the most gossipy 'academic' book I have ever read. Cantor takes as his purpose the outlining of the birth and growth of medieval studies as an academic field and discussing how the main players in each of the phases of its development that he has identified shaped our perception of the middle ages by incorporating their own generational, societal, and personal concerns into what was ostensibly an impartial research of the facts. Thus we have the specific interests and preconceptions of each succeeding generation of scholars subtly (or not so subtly) changing the face of our understanding of the medieval period...sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.
Cantor does not stint in his discussion of each of these major players from divulging facts (and I imagine hearsay) tied to each of them and painting each of them with a rather broad brush so that they can be more easily classified. We can even see this in the chapter headings Cantor utilizes where certain scholars are either "the Nazi twins", "the French Jews", "the Oxford fantasists" or "the Once & Future King". I gather that Cantor himself was something of a controversial figure in the field and I am sure this book did not make him any more loved by his enemies. I am not sure how high I would rate this book as a real scholarly introduction to the study of the Middle Ages (not very highly I imagine), but I did find it useful as a source for what scholars and works I ought to look into to get a foundational grasp of the development of medieval studies...and it was certainly an entertaining read.
Cantor does not stint in his discussion of each of these major players from divulging facts (and I imagine hearsay) tied to each of them and painting each of them with a rather broad brush so that they can be more easily classified. We can even see this in the chapter headings Cantor utilizes where certain scholars are either "the Nazi twins", "the French Jews", "the Oxford fantasists" or "the Once & Future King". I gather that Cantor himself was something of a controversial figure in the field and I am sure this book did not make him any more loved by his enemies. I am not sure how high I would rate this book as a real scholarly introduction to the study of the Middle Ages (not very highly I imagine), but I did find it useful as a source for what scholars and works I ought to look into to get a foundational grasp of the development of medieval studies...and it was certainly an entertaining read.
May 4, 2018
This is a phenomenal book, a kind of parallel history of the Middle Ages and the twentieth century combined with biographical sketches and book reviews of the great twentieth-century medievalists and their work. Every single chapter in this book was endlessly fascinating. For me, a major highlight was the chapter on "the Oxford fantasists" notably CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. I had never before read a serious assessment of the Inklings from an academic historian's perspective even though they were by and large academic historians themselves. Cantor is far from dismissive of them, which in 1990 when this book was published cannot have been a very respectable perspective.
But I'm tempted to go through this book chapter by chapter. There are lightbulbs on every page and the whole thing is wound up with a wonderful appendix containing a list of major historical works on the middle ages. There are fascinating details on the influence of Woodrow Wilsonian statism in the study of the Norman duchy, or the pre-Vatican II Roman church's extremely difficult relationship with its best and brightest medieval scholars, and much more. Cantor is unabashedly interested in how the great medievalists' lives and worldviews informed their perspective on the history, which works well when he confines himself to their overt beliefs and becomes nonsensical when he attempts psychoanalysis and alleges various sexual repressions. There are a number of other places I'd disagree with Cantor's conclusions (eg, I agree with him that medieval society was a persecuting society, but that was not because of a lack of separation of church and state but rather because of a top-down, hierarchical conception of both institutions, as well as the family).
Overall, however, this could be the most helpful and enlightening single book I have read on the Middle Ages, a high-level overview that opens up many more avenues of exploration. Don't miss this book!
But I'm tempted to go through this book chapter by chapter. There are lightbulbs on every page and the whole thing is wound up with a wonderful appendix containing a list of major historical works on the middle ages. There are fascinating details on the influence of Woodrow Wilsonian statism in the study of the Norman duchy, or the pre-Vatican II Roman church's extremely difficult relationship with its best and brightest medieval scholars, and much more. Cantor is unabashedly interested in how the great medievalists' lives and worldviews informed their perspective on the history, which works well when he confines himself to their overt beliefs and becomes nonsensical when he attempts psychoanalysis and alleges various sexual repressions. There are a number of other places I'd disagree with Cantor's conclusions (eg, I agree with him that medieval society was a persecuting society, but that was not because of a lack of separation of church and state but rather because of a top-down, hierarchical conception of both institutions, as well as the family).
Overall, however, this could be the most helpful and enlightening single book I have read on the Middle Ages, a high-level overview that opens up many more avenues of exploration. Don't miss this book!
April 12, 2011
In Inventing the Middle Ages, Cantor manages to pull off what I'd imagine is quite a tricky task - writing a informative, fun, and lively book about historiography. He jumps around through the 20th century, touching on English, French, German, and American medievalists who studied art, literature, kingship, law, and social relations. It's an ambitious book, and it's impressive that it doesn't feel more arbitrary or scatter-shot than it does.
Any work like this is going to be heavily subjective, and it's to Cantor's credit that he owns up to this consistently. Because of that, it's not a great book to turn to if you want get an overview of medieval history. But if you already have a bit of a foundation on the subject, it's a lot of fun to get a peek behind the curtain at the people behind the texts. In fact, to a certain extent Cantor is at his best when he's most subjective, personal, and gossipy. There's a fascinating section near the end concerning Oxford don R.W. Southern, who Cantor sets up as a sort of romantic hero, drawing starry-eyed young medievalists from around the world to his medieval studies round table. It's an odd balancing act between memoir and historiographical analysis and it's one of the most lively sections of Cantor's book. Other sections unfortunately lack the same verve: his discussion of Tolkien and Lewis had the potential to be very interesting, considering their less traditional contribution to the field of medieval studies, but instead they wind up being relatively uninspired (though to Cantor's credit, he admits that he's not a fan Tolkien, but still gives him a fair bit of respect). His commentary on the scholars he met is always better than the more removed and hesitant comments on those he has not.
All said, it's a fun, informative, if occasionally uneven book. Definitely recommended, though!
Any work like this is going to be heavily subjective, and it's to Cantor's credit that he owns up to this consistently. Because of that, it's not a great book to turn to if you want get an overview of medieval history. But if you already have a bit of a foundation on the subject, it's a lot of fun to get a peek behind the curtain at the people behind the texts. In fact, to a certain extent Cantor is at his best when he's most subjective, personal, and gossipy. There's a fascinating section near the end concerning Oxford don R.W. Southern, who Cantor sets up as a sort of romantic hero, drawing starry-eyed young medievalists from around the world to his medieval studies round table. It's an odd balancing act between memoir and historiographical analysis and it's one of the most lively sections of Cantor's book. Other sections unfortunately lack the same verve: his discussion of Tolkien and Lewis had the potential to be very interesting, considering their less traditional contribution to the field of medieval studies, but instead they wind up being relatively uninspired (though to Cantor's credit, he admits that he's not a fan Tolkien, but still gives him a fair bit of respect). His commentary on the scholars he met is always better than the more removed and hesitant comments on those he has not.
All said, it's a fun, informative, if occasionally uneven book. Definitely recommended, though!
March 4, 2017
Norman Cantor (1991) takes the various approaches to medieval historiography and uses them to illustrate scholarship in general, and from there draws a number of interesting conclusions about modern politics, religion, and social life (Cantor, 410-414). Cantor got in trouble for writing this work. While 80% of this work is brilliant scholarship, the other 20% make the tabloids look like peer-reviewed journals! The subtitle of the book should read “Professor Guilty of Sex Scandal: Cantor Tells All!” Then again, that is also why the book is so highly entertaining. After reading this book one may legitimately talk trash about various historians. Just kidding…sort of.
The study of the middle ages in the twentieth century was a microcosm of the larger battle for Western civilization. We see the Hegelian dialectic at work in which the culturally conservative U.S. Government (just go with it for the moment) was funding radical left-wing schools in France whose only merit was they were not politically active Communists. We see conservative reactions in the Formalist school, yet even this school merely asserted cultural conservatism--it never defined it at its roots.
The Functionalists
The functionalist school of the Middle Ages represented the apex of modernity's scholarship: it's objective was to (rightly) note that people in the Middle Ages (or whenever) did something for a reason. Actions presupposed a function (53). Representative of this approach was Maitland. The problem with this approach represents the problem with modernity in general (and the University in particular): it isolated one aspect of reality and unwittingly identified that aspect with the whole of reality. Further, it is unable to write about larger strands throughout a period of history (Versluis 2000).
The Nazi Twins
Jewish historian Ernst Kantorowicz must be an embarrassment to international Jewry: he is a Nazi Jew! Against the Formalist school (see below), Kantorowicz read the Middle Ages not as a unified consensus, but as a dialectical development waiting for a charismatic invididual to exploit it (Cantor 1991: 203). Cantor's original project was a revisionist biography on Frederick II. It was criticized by scholars as "unscholarly" and "pop history," but who cared? Kantorowicz simultaneously captured the spirit of great men while communicating history in a clear and engaging manner. Unfortunately, one can easily see the connection to Hitler, whose rise eventually forced Kantorowicz to leave Europe. On the other hand, his masterpiece was The King's Two Bodies, which traced the dialectical impact of "the twinned-person" idea on Medieval politics and is arguably the finest genealogical critique of late Western medieval theology.
The French Jewish School
One could probably summarize its approach, not surprisingly, as left-wing and nigh close to Marxism. It was not officially Marxist, though. This distinction is important because it is this distinction which allowed the CIA to fund radical left-wing institutions in Paris as a left-wing alternative to Marxism, presumably with American tax dollars (149). The ideology behind this school was heavily endorsed in the American universities.
Cantor's discussion of the French Mandarin system is worth the price of the book (124-135). In this system one worked his way up through the respected eschelons of the university hierarchy. If one had the ability to write well, local salons would publish his work, making him a celebrity. American universities, always wanting to be fashionable, would discuss (and informally endorse) this philosophe's work and invite him on a lecture circuit in the U.S. As Cantor notes (and as only he could), "He will be idolized by the prexy's wife at the reception afterwards, and female graduate students will offer him both their minds and their bodies" (126).
The limitation of this school of thought is in the limitations of Marxism itself. When Marxism ceased to go out of style in the Academy, and other historical models were suggested, the Annales approach found itself marginalized.
The Formalists
The Formalists were the cultural neoconservatives of medieval studies. Their focus was primarily on art and iconography, and they advanced the sensible thesis that artistic works (and probably culture at large) could not be separated from the texts that inspired them (161). For the functionalists, this presupposes a continuity between religious and cultural texts. For anyone familiar with Patristic and Medieval Theology, this is exactly the case (more so with Patristic theology in the East). This is in contradistinction to the Functionalist school and in radical contradiction to the French Jewish school.
The truth (and problem) of the formalist school is with their argument: it is true that texts cannot be divorced from the life around them—and the best way to communicate this life is in art (and poetry). If one is positing a unified continuity from the Patristics to the 15th century, then one is sadly mistaken as it ignores the huge differences between the Franks and Eastern Romans on one hand, and the Celts and Western Romans on the other.
The Oxford Fantasists
This is probably the most famous part of the book. Cantor discusses the two most beloved writers of the English language in the twentieth century: Clive Staples Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Their project is simple: draw upon the glories of medieval culture to rebuilt the shattered England from the ashes of WWII. While they accomplished no such goal, few can deny the staggering impact they have had on readers across the world.
It is at this point in the narrative that scholarly conservatives (and evangelicals in particular) will cry “shenanigans!” Cantor suggests Lewis was sexually repressed and was unable to consummate his marriage for several months, only to have his wife forcibly seduce him (211). The first problem with this statement is the obvious one: evidence? None. The culprit is nearby, however. One suspects Cantor is relying upon the speculations of Ian Wilson, who bore no love for Lewis. Yet, does not Cantor admit that Wilson failed in the basics of scholarly research and the demonstration of evidence (430)? Why should we take Wilson seriously?
The American School
The American school is the ideological brainchild of Woodrow Wilson. It’s particular historical methods are not that important. On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson’s worldview has dominated American politics (and by extension, literally the rest of the world) for 90 years. Not surprisingly, we see the American medieval history school as a justification for post-Christian Western politics.
The actual historical arguments by representatives Strayer and others are not that interesting, except for this: it is a specific justification of the Norman invasion of England, and the replacing of Saxon culture with a specifically Norman and Papal culture (269). Such a task also involves a rewriting of the “other” culture’s history. Interestingly, Strayer was also a CIA asset (262). One cannot help but speculate on the connections between Wilsonian progressivism, Norman and Frankish historiography, and the CIA: all of which contribute to the relativising of traditional communities around the world (at least today).
Neo-Thomism
Cantor has a sexually charged chapter dealing with the neo-Thomists David Knowles and Etienne Gilson. It makes for interesting reading, but if the reader is either ignorant of Freud, or rejects Freud, or simply doesn’t care, then much of this chapter can be skipped. In all seriousness, Cantor does highlight the inability of Thomist Catholicism to offer a coherent account of the Middle Ages from Augustine to Ockham. Gilson tries, but Cantor dissects him quite well. (Personally, I think Cantor is wrong, but his analysis of Gilson is correct. Here is the problem: Cantor says Gilson cannot offer a unified reading because the discontinuity between Augustine and Aquinas is too great. However, granting the discontinuity, one can also say that Aquinas is the dialectical synthesis of Augustine. Or rather, he is the antithesis and Ockam is the synthesis. Obviously, Gilson will not take that interpretation).
Outriders
In a daring stroke of genius, Cantor illustrates the truth of his project by devoting a chapter on feminist writers who either reject medievalism or reconstruct its accepted tenets. These feminist critiques illustrate the limitations of the above historical models, but also the real gains and the directions in which future medieval history will take.
Conclusion
The book is outrageous because of its daring. Part of it is brilliant historiography, the rest of it is scandalous tabloid. Let’s be honest: few can deny the book’s entertaining value. Fewer still can deny its scholarly arguments. Indeed, we followed his arguments because he tied them in with the moral peccadilloes of most of his comrades. Granted, I think he overdid it, nor do I ascribe the same normative and omnipotent value to psychoanalysis, especially the sexual aspects.
On the other hand, this book is a must read in terms of historiography. It should be mandated in all freshman history and liberal arts classes. It is interdisciplinary in character and demonstrates the best ways to integrate various fields.
Sources:
Cantor, Norma. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991.
Versluis, Arthur. "Western Esotericism and Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7 (no.6) 2000: pp. 20-33.
The study of the middle ages in the twentieth century was a microcosm of the larger battle for Western civilization. We see the Hegelian dialectic at work in which the culturally conservative U.S. Government (just go with it for the moment) was funding radical left-wing schools in France whose only merit was they were not politically active Communists. We see conservative reactions in the Formalist school, yet even this school merely asserted cultural conservatism--it never defined it at its roots.
The Functionalists
The functionalist school of the Middle Ages represented the apex of modernity's scholarship: it's objective was to (rightly) note that people in the Middle Ages (or whenever) did something for a reason. Actions presupposed a function (53). Representative of this approach was Maitland. The problem with this approach represents the problem with modernity in general (and the University in particular): it isolated one aspect of reality and unwittingly identified that aspect with the whole of reality. Further, it is unable to write about larger strands throughout a period of history (Versluis 2000).
The Nazi Twins
Jewish historian Ernst Kantorowicz must be an embarrassment to international Jewry: he is a Nazi Jew! Against the Formalist school (see below), Kantorowicz read the Middle Ages not as a unified consensus, but as a dialectical development waiting for a charismatic invididual to exploit it (Cantor 1991: 203). Cantor's original project was a revisionist biography on Frederick II. It was criticized by scholars as "unscholarly" and "pop history," but who cared? Kantorowicz simultaneously captured the spirit of great men while communicating history in a clear and engaging manner. Unfortunately, one can easily see the connection to Hitler, whose rise eventually forced Kantorowicz to leave Europe. On the other hand, his masterpiece was The King's Two Bodies, which traced the dialectical impact of "the twinned-person" idea on Medieval politics and is arguably the finest genealogical critique of late Western medieval theology.
The French Jewish School
One could probably summarize its approach, not surprisingly, as left-wing and nigh close to Marxism. It was not officially Marxist, though. This distinction is important because it is this distinction which allowed the CIA to fund radical left-wing institutions in Paris as a left-wing alternative to Marxism, presumably with American tax dollars (149). The ideology behind this school was heavily endorsed in the American universities.
Cantor's discussion of the French Mandarin system is worth the price of the book (124-135). In this system one worked his way up through the respected eschelons of the university hierarchy. If one had the ability to write well, local salons would publish his work, making him a celebrity. American universities, always wanting to be fashionable, would discuss (and informally endorse) this philosophe's work and invite him on a lecture circuit in the U.S. As Cantor notes (and as only he could), "He will be idolized by the prexy's wife at the reception afterwards, and female graduate students will offer him both their minds and their bodies" (126).
The limitation of this school of thought is in the limitations of Marxism itself. When Marxism ceased to go out of style in the Academy, and other historical models were suggested, the Annales approach found itself marginalized.
The Formalists
The Formalists were the cultural neoconservatives of medieval studies. Their focus was primarily on art and iconography, and they advanced the sensible thesis that artistic works (and probably culture at large) could not be separated from the texts that inspired them (161). For the functionalists, this presupposes a continuity between religious and cultural texts. For anyone familiar with Patristic and Medieval Theology, this is exactly the case (more so with Patristic theology in the East). This is in contradistinction to the Functionalist school and in radical contradiction to the French Jewish school.
The truth (and problem) of the formalist school is with their argument: it is true that texts cannot be divorced from the life around them—and the best way to communicate this life is in art (and poetry). If one is positing a unified continuity from the Patristics to the 15th century, then one is sadly mistaken as it ignores the huge differences between the Franks and Eastern Romans on one hand, and the Celts and Western Romans on the other.
The Oxford Fantasists
This is probably the most famous part of the book. Cantor discusses the two most beloved writers of the English language in the twentieth century: Clive Staples Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Their project is simple: draw upon the glories of medieval culture to rebuilt the shattered England from the ashes of WWII. While they accomplished no such goal, few can deny the staggering impact they have had on readers across the world.
It is at this point in the narrative that scholarly conservatives (and evangelicals in particular) will cry “shenanigans!” Cantor suggests Lewis was sexually repressed and was unable to consummate his marriage for several months, only to have his wife forcibly seduce him (211). The first problem with this statement is the obvious one: evidence? None. The culprit is nearby, however. One suspects Cantor is relying upon the speculations of Ian Wilson, who bore no love for Lewis. Yet, does not Cantor admit that Wilson failed in the basics of scholarly research and the demonstration of evidence (430)? Why should we take Wilson seriously?
The American School
The American school is the ideological brainchild of Woodrow Wilson. It’s particular historical methods are not that important. On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson’s worldview has dominated American politics (and by extension, literally the rest of the world) for 90 years. Not surprisingly, we see the American medieval history school as a justification for post-Christian Western politics.
The actual historical arguments by representatives Strayer and others are not that interesting, except for this: it is a specific justification of the Norman invasion of England, and the replacing of Saxon culture with a specifically Norman and Papal culture (269). Such a task also involves a rewriting of the “other” culture’s history. Interestingly, Strayer was also a CIA asset (262). One cannot help but speculate on the connections between Wilsonian progressivism, Norman and Frankish historiography, and the CIA: all of which contribute to the relativising of traditional communities around the world (at least today).
Neo-Thomism
Cantor has a sexually charged chapter dealing with the neo-Thomists David Knowles and Etienne Gilson. It makes for interesting reading, but if the reader is either ignorant of Freud, or rejects Freud, or simply doesn’t care, then much of this chapter can be skipped. In all seriousness, Cantor does highlight the inability of Thomist Catholicism to offer a coherent account of the Middle Ages from Augustine to Ockham. Gilson tries, but Cantor dissects him quite well. (Personally, I think Cantor is wrong, but his analysis of Gilson is correct. Here is the problem: Cantor says Gilson cannot offer a unified reading because the discontinuity between Augustine and Aquinas is too great. However, granting the discontinuity, one can also say that Aquinas is the dialectical synthesis of Augustine. Or rather, he is the antithesis and Ockam is the synthesis. Obviously, Gilson will not take that interpretation).
Outriders
In a daring stroke of genius, Cantor illustrates the truth of his project by devoting a chapter on feminist writers who either reject medievalism or reconstruct its accepted tenets. These feminist critiques illustrate the limitations of the above historical models, but also the real gains and the directions in which future medieval history will take.
Conclusion
The book is outrageous because of its daring. Part of it is brilliant historiography, the rest of it is scandalous tabloid. Let’s be honest: few can deny the book’s entertaining value. Fewer still can deny its scholarly arguments. Indeed, we followed his arguments because he tied them in with the moral peccadilloes of most of his comrades. Granted, I think he overdid it, nor do I ascribe the same normative and omnipotent value to psychoanalysis, especially the sexual aspects.
On the other hand, this book is a must read in terms of historiography. It should be mandated in all freshman history and liberal arts classes. It is interdisciplinary in character and demonstrates the best ways to integrate various fields.
Sources:
Cantor, Norma. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1991.
Versluis, Arthur. "Western Esotericism and Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7 (no.6) 2000: pp. 20-33.
August 8, 2020
This book checked all the boxes to be a good book: it drew the ire of modern medievalists who felt that Cantor focused too much on traditional scholarship and didn't focus enough on the intersectional politically correct current trends in academia. It was written before Universities went off the rails by a professor who had connections on both sides of the Atlantic, even wikipedia described Cantor as ‘intellectually conservative and expressed deep skepticism about what he saw as methodological fads, particularly Marxism and postmodernism’ etc.
However, the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.
Often academics think they don't have a bias. Anyone to the left of them is a communist and anyone to the right must be a fascist, but they are scholars. Having a liberal-statist-left-of-centre-non-marxist-progressive perspective, despite what everyone around you in academia and the media thinks, is a form of bias. Taking shots at both those to the right and left doesn't make anyone neutral, unless Poland in September 1939 was neutral because it fought both Nazi Germany and the USSR. And professor Cantor has a painfully obvious bias in the book.
If you anticipate reading a book about Medieval scholarship and important trends, like I did, than the book is not for you. I can't imagine anyone picking up this book without having read a good number of books on the Middle Ages, many likely from before 1990 (when the book was written). After the first half of the book though, the reader migh be surprised to find out that there were important Medieval historians who were not Jewish (or any medievalists who were not). But Cantor has an obsession, not only with Jewish historians, but with the fact that they were Jewish and gosspis incessantly about it. Clearly there were important Jewish Medievalists in the first half of the 20th century, Bloch, Panofsky, Halphen and Kantorowicz spring to mind, but they were not important because of (or despite) their ancestory. But Cantor cannot let any connection to Judaism pass without (repeated) comment, a scion of a wealthy German Jewish family...a Jewish professor... he thought of himself as a Jew... like another Jew...scion of the old Jewish banking family... other eminent German Jewish scientists... old French Jewish middle class...Alsatian Jewry in his blood... son of a Belgian Rabbi... Parisian high-bourgeois Jew... an immigrant Jew... Dutch Jews... came from a wealthy German Jewish family... assimilated Jews... the first Jew to... a precocious Jew... a militant Russian Jewish convert... a Jew with Catholic leanings... another mandarin Jew... his brilliant Jewish wife... his parents were Jewish... his Jewish friend... the half-Jewish historian...
But there is no mention of much that gave the debate regarding the Middle Ages so much colour. Gibbons, Runciman, Lea and later Coulton, who shaped much of the Whig history (and bias) are completely ignored or dismissed. The amusing debates between Thurston and Lea, or Belloc and Coulton (well related in Six Studies In Quarrelling, The Medieval Inquisition and Controversies: High Level Catholic Apologetics - Newman, Belloc, Knox, Lunn, Thurston) are not mentioned. Instead, the reader is left with a collection of second-rate, sometimes hagiographic and sometimes verging on libelious, biographies of people he thought were important (mostly to him).
Cantor's chapter on 'The Oxford Fantasists' displays an apalling lack of sympathy for CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien coupled with scandalous speculation about their sex-lives. CS Lewis is repeatedly denounced as an “extremely repressed sexually” (p. 211) “dualist” (p. 219) who had a “bizarre, probably celibate, repressive, sadomasochistic relationship” (p. 207) with his housekeeper. Only a superficial mention of Tolkien’s personal history, as it related to his Catholicism and writings, is mentioned, not even enough to fill an obituary stub.
The chapter 'After the Fall' (Dom David Knowles and Etienne Gilson) shows barely superficial appreciation of Catholic scholarship, neo-Thomism and an inquisitorial Church that would make the KGB proud or jealous. Maritain would be surprised to hear he was a neo-Thomist. Cantor even repeatedly confuses a Nihil Obstat with an Imprimatur "no ecclesiastical imprimatur (notice of license from a bishop certifying that nothing in the book was offensive to faith and morals)" (p.305). All in all, Cantor displays a shocking ignorance, not only of the Catholic Church (for a Medievalist), but of the history of Catholic scholarship in the twentieth century (starting with Lord Acton and continuing through Gilson, Chenu, Maritain, de Lubac, Congar, Danielou and both Vatican I and Vatican II). Gilson and Maritain are even called ‘liberals’ (p. 123 and p. 215)
Cantor's favourites invariably are those with whom he has had person contact, R.W. Southern, Strayer and Mommsen, respectively his Rhodes scholar supervisor, doctoral supervisor and friend/colleague. Perhaps this is a psychological deference to his immediate superiors, but more like self-promotion.
The concluding chapter ‘Outriders’ is hilarious for his predictions in scholarship and world politics, “Scarcely anybody believes anymore in capitalism and socialism as value systems.” (p. 411) I would argue that capitalism and socialism (marxist inspired intersectionality) are the only two active ‘value systems’ dominating the west, represented by the enthusiasm for Trump and the opposition to anything labelled ‘capitalist’ in universities today. Cantor sees a medieval inspired (Christian) fanaticism and ‘protototalitarian’ Church-State system as a danger of uncritical idealization of the Middle Ages.
So this all begs the questions, what is this book good for? Well, I suppose the book led me to look into a few of the books on my bookshelf (Huizinga) or the used bookstore more closely. And the bibliographical notes (oddly organized as endnote paragraphs) will make me more inclined to expand the diversity of my reading material.
All in all I prefered The Twelfth-Century Renaissance for the debate regarding the interpretation of the Middle Ages.
However, the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend.
Often academics think they don't have a bias. Anyone to the left of them is a communist and anyone to the right must be a fascist, but they are scholars. Having a liberal-statist-left-of-centre-non-marxist-progressive perspective, despite what everyone around you in academia and the media thinks, is a form of bias. Taking shots at both those to the right and left doesn't make anyone neutral, unless Poland in September 1939 was neutral because it fought both Nazi Germany and the USSR. And professor Cantor has a painfully obvious bias in the book.
If you anticipate reading a book about Medieval scholarship and important trends, like I did, than the book is not for you. I can't imagine anyone picking up this book without having read a good number of books on the Middle Ages, many likely from before 1990 (when the book was written). After the first half of the book though, the reader migh be surprised to find out that there were important Medieval historians who were not Jewish (or any medievalists who were not). But Cantor has an obsession, not only with Jewish historians, but with the fact that they were Jewish and gosspis incessantly about it. Clearly there were important Jewish Medievalists in the first half of the 20th century, Bloch, Panofsky, Halphen and Kantorowicz spring to mind, but they were not important because of (or despite) their ancestory. But Cantor cannot let any connection to Judaism pass without (repeated) comment, a scion of a wealthy German Jewish family...a Jewish professor... he thought of himself as a Jew... like another Jew...scion of the old Jewish banking family... other eminent German Jewish scientists... old French Jewish middle class...Alsatian Jewry in his blood... son of a Belgian Rabbi... Parisian high-bourgeois Jew... an immigrant Jew... Dutch Jews... came from a wealthy German Jewish family... assimilated Jews... the first Jew to... a precocious Jew... a militant Russian Jewish convert... a Jew with Catholic leanings... another mandarin Jew... his brilliant Jewish wife... his parents were Jewish... his Jewish friend... the half-Jewish historian...
But there is no mention of much that gave the debate regarding the Middle Ages so much colour. Gibbons, Runciman, Lea and later Coulton, who shaped much of the Whig history (and bias) are completely ignored or dismissed. The amusing debates between Thurston and Lea, or Belloc and Coulton (well related in Six Studies In Quarrelling, The Medieval Inquisition and Controversies: High Level Catholic Apologetics - Newman, Belloc, Knox, Lunn, Thurston) are not mentioned. Instead, the reader is left with a collection of second-rate, sometimes hagiographic and sometimes verging on libelious, biographies of people he thought were important (mostly to him).
Cantor's chapter on 'The Oxford Fantasists' displays an apalling lack of sympathy for CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien coupled with scandalous speculation about their sex-lives. CS Lewis is repeatedly denounced as an “extremely repressed sexually” (p. 211) “dualist” (p. 219) who had a “bizarre, probably celibate, repressive, sadomasochistic relationship” (p. 207) with his housekeeper. Only a superficial mention of Tolkien’s personal history, as it related to his Catholicism and writings, is mentioned, not even enough to fill an obituary stub.
The chapter 'After the Fall' (Dom David Knowles and Etienne Gilson) shows barely superficial appreciation of Catholic scholarship, neo-Thomism and an inquisitorial Church that would make the KGB proud or jealous. Maritain would be surprised to hear he was a neo-Thomist. Cantor even repeatedly confuses a Nihil Obstat with an Imprimatur "no ecclesiastical imprimatur (notice of license from a bishop certifying that nothing in the book was offensive to faith and morals)" (p.305). All in all, Cantor displays a shocking ignorance, not only of the Catholic Church (for a Medievalist), but of the history of Catholic scholarship in the twentieth century (starting with Lord Acton and continuing through Gilson, Chenu, Maritain, de Lubac, Congar, Danielou and both Vatican I and Vatican II). Gilson and Maritain are even called ‘liberals’ (p. 123 and p. 215)
Cantor's favourites invariably are those with whom he has had person contact, R.W. Southern, Strayer and Mommsen, respectively his Rhodes scholar supervisor, doctoral supervisor and friend/colleague. Perhaps this is a psychological deference to his immediate superiors, but more like self-promotion.
The concluding chapter ‘Outriders’ is hilarious for his predictions in scholarship and world politics, “Scarcely anybody believes anymore in capitalism and socialism as value systems.” (p. 411) I would argue that capitalism and socialism (marxist inspired intersectionality) are the only two active ‘value systems’ dominating the west, represented by the enthusiasm for Trump and the opposition to anything labelled ‘capitalist’ in universities today. Cantor sees a medieval inspired (Christian) fanaticism and ‘protototalitarian’ Church-State system as a danger of uncritical idealization of the Middle Ages.
So this all begs the questions, what is this book good for? Well, I suppose the book led me to look into a few of the books on my bookshelf (Huizinga) or the used bookstore more closely. And the bibliographical notes (oddly organized as endnote paragraphs) will make me more inclined to expand the diversity of my reading material.
All in all I prefered The Twelfth-Century Renaissance for the debate regarding the interpretation of the Middle Ages.
April 20, 2022
Part memoir, part Medieval history, part intellectual history, I found Norman Cantor's book "Inventing the Middle Ages" brilliant and entertaining. His driving thesis is clear enough: the image we have of the Middle Ages grows out of the scholarship of a few, very talented and influential medievalists in the 20th century. Before then, the time period was either dismissed as hopelessly dark or revered as romantic. Neither notion was driven by real historiography. Cantor was the inheritor of these intellectual giants and he wants us to know who they are and how their interpretation of the Middle Ages was driven by the situations they found themselves in when they were writing. Thus the book becomes both and overview of Medieval scholarship and a survey of the intellectual currents of the 20th century. I am not qualified to know if his portraits were accurate. I suppose the better you know the subject them more holes you will see in his summary. It was interesting for me to see him survey the work and influence of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as medievalists. We know them as fantasy writers and Christian apologists, but they were also scholars who contributed significantly to the "invention" of the Middle Ages in the 20th century. His sketch of them was fair and largely accurate but not reverential. He also introduces us to other Oxford Dons, German scholars who collaborated with the Nazis and others who fled from them as well as Catholic writers, Marxist and Feminists. If you enjoy intellectual history or medieval history you will love this book.
July 5, 2024
An opinionated, irreverent study of medieval historiography using biographical studies more than analytic themes. The narrative fits broader trends in the human sciences.
August 22, 2007
Cantor ablely lays out the various schools of thought in 20th century Middle Ages Studies. This book was close to a god send for me. I've been reading almost exclusively out of the Annales school, like a blind man, having no idea that there were other areas to explore (more accurately, what those avenues might be).
Cantor uses the personalities and backgrounds of the major midievialists to explain their works. Along the way he offers excellent summations and critiques of the various works. He includes a list of 125 books that provide a "core collection" of the subject.
If there is a thesis or over riding theme in this book is that the great tragedy was the triumph of the instutition builiding Annales school at the expensive of the more talented (and English) R.W. Southern. Cantor goes so far to present Southern's refusal to create an institute in his image as an "Arthurian tragedy".
I understand what he's talking about since I've been reading on the subject for over a year and have yet to come across anything other the annales school and their decendants. Funny.
I haven't been this excited about a book in a couple years. I read it in about a day and if you have gotten to the point where you are reading this review, I HIGHLY recommend you get this immeditately.
Cantor uses the personalities and backgrounds of the major midievialists to explain their works. Along the way he offers excellent summations and critiques of the various works. He includes a list of 125 books that provide a "core collection" of the subject.
If there is a thesis or over riding theme in this book is that the great tragedy was the triumph of the instutition builiding Annales school at the expensive of the more talented (and English) R.W. Southern. Cantor goes so far to present Southern's refusal to create an institute in his image as an "Arthurian tragedy".
I understand what he's talking about since I've been reading on the subject for over a year and have yet to come across anything other the annales school and their decendants. Funny.
I haven't been this excited about a book in a couple years. I read it in about a day and if you have gotten to the point where you are reading this review, I HIGHLY recommend you get this immeditately.
January 20, 2020
I knew this book and I were not going to be friends at Chapter 1, where Cantor reduces all of the early Middle Ages (my area of study and interest) to a period of backward barbarism, especially when compared with the gloriously advanced 12th century (and onward). If you want me to dislike a book, just un-ironically refer to the years 500-1000 as "the Dark Ages." grrr...
As for the later chapters, I definitely learned some new names and was able to connect those names to big traditions in history and historiographical writing. I'm a lit person myself, so the actual discipline of history is pretty new to me, and it was handy to get a grounding in who's-who and what's what--like seeing a star lineup of the heavy-hitters in the field. I even think Cantor's premise--that historians interpret history based on the modern ideologies and philosophies that have shaped them--is probably correct, and has interesting applications outside medieval studies.
But Cantor's ego keeps intruding into the book (everyone I know labels it 'gossipy') in the form of snide comments and some sexism as well. Curiously, Cantor's awareness of personal bias in reading history seems to end before he gets to himself...
2 stars.
As for the later chapters, I definitely learned some new names and was able to connect those names to big traditions in history and historiographical writing. I'm a lit person myself, so the actual discipline of history is pretty new to me, and it was handy to get a grounding in who's-who and what's what--like seeing a star lineup of the heavy-hitters in the field. I even think Cantor's premise--that historians interpret history based on the modern ideologies and philosophies that have shaped them--is probably correct, and has interesting applications outside medieval studies.
But Cantor's ego keeps intruding into the book (everyone I know labels it 'gossipy') in the form of snide comments and some sexism as well. Curiously, Cantor's awareness of personal bias in reading history seems to end before he gets to himself...
2 stars.
February 3, 2013
An examination of prominent historians since 1905. The author makes the point that the work done before this date has very little impact and no validity as history according to the modern definition of the term.
The introduction is a well done overview of the medieval time period, what we know about it, and how we know it. In the following chapters he breaks up the various schools of thought by their best hist and gives us a little biography.
While I think this is a book meant for those interested in the theory of history and not meant to be a popular work, I think the author does a creditable job of making the topics covered mostly approachable. There were very few concepts that I found too technical. While dry in places overall it was a good read that shed some light on the authors of books in my collection.
The introduction is a well done overview of the medieval time period, what we know about it, and how we know it. In the following chapters he breaks up the various schools of thought by their best hist and gives us a little biography.
While I think this is a book meant for those interested in the theory of history and not meant to be a popular work, I think the author does a creditable job of making the topics covered mostly approachable. There were very few concepts that I found too technical. While dry in places overall it was a good read that shed some light on the authors of books in my collection.
August 10, 2014
I realize that this book is not very highly regarded by professional medievalists, but I found it extremely interesting, even though at times the style was rather OMG and I had serious ideological differences with the author, who is quite conservative. But his writing is incredibly engaging, and a picture emerges of the tremendous revolution in medieval studies between 1890 and 1965 that I found extremely compelling and helpful.
A few notes on the Goodreads headnote: obviously the romantic idea of the Middle Ages as being full of knights and tournaments predates Maitland's study of English common law. This is about the emergence of a more substantive academic understanding of medieval culture. Also, a very important thread in this book that will interest many readers is the tremendous impact of Jewish scholars during the era of fascism and WWII. Really fascinating.
A few notes on the Goodreads headnote: obviously the romantic idea of the Middle Ages as being full of knights and tournaments predates Maitland's study of English common law. This is about the emergence of a more substantive academic understanding of medieval culture. Also, a very important thread in this book that will interest many readers is the tremendous impact of Jewish scholars during the era of fascism and WWII. Really fascinating.
December 19, 2022
Looking at the the other comments most readers seem to see the book in terms on one of two framings: either it says the "wrong" things about the Middle Ages; or it's academic gossip.
If you see the world in either of those two framings, I guess you two won't like it.
Here's what I saw when I read it:
- In terms of the Middle Ages, essentially every chapter gives a different point of view on the period. We hear something of law in the Middle Ages, then German Politics, then Art, then Literature, then Religion, then... In a sense that is obvious, except that in each of those chapters Cantor explains why the subject(s) of the chapter told us something about that aspect of the subject that was not at all obvious, that may be received wisdom now, but was not part of the worldview of academic history before 1900 or so.
- Secondly, Cantor wants us to realize that history is written by human beings. We learned these things about the Middle Ages because specific individuals with specific idiosyncrasies engaged in the hard work of research, then thought, then writing, to explain them to us. This knowledge did not derive from revelation, nor was it handed down from generation to generation, neither was it manufactured by state machinery or immense collectives; it was the product of one individual human at a time.
- Thirdly, each of those humans was different from the others. It's pretty much par for our times that the people who seem to hate this book most because it lacks "diversity" apparently never read it! Diversity is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Color, gender, sexuality; those are what define diversity -- but god forbid we put any sort of importance on the diversity of the character or personalities of individuals. After all, it was Hitler, wasn't it, who said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
What stood out to ME from this cavalcade of characters is that anyone can be a Medieval historian if they're willing to put in the work. Aristocrat or peasant, born in Europe or outside it, gregarious or anti-social, child prodigy or late bloomer; all can do great work.
- Finally Cantor wants to make the point that how ideas play out is substantially dependent on contingent factors. The politics surrounding an author (maybe from choices made by that author, maybe pure randomness) may make it convenient for others to laud the work, or to avoid it. Charisma can give some authors a much louder megaphone than others. That's a fact, and pretending otherwise is bad history. And if you're an idiot, that's the end of the story, cue grievance studies.
But suppose you're not an idiot? Well, then, presumably you care more about the history than the petty issues of who gets the groupies and who doesn't. And Cantor's point is that, in the end, the work speaks for itself.
The author may have a happy or sad life, one successful (by some definition of success...) or not, prolific or not; may have many, few or no students, may leave (or barely even join) academia. But in the end we all die, only our works remain. And good works are recognized as good, live on, and provide value long after the lives that wrote the books.
If that fact of the world doesn't appeal to you, then perhaps you're going to be unhappy about ANYTHING to do with the realities of both history "long ago" and academic life in most fields....
If you see the world in either of those two framings, I guess you two won't like it.
Here's what I saw when I read it:
- In terms of the Middle Ages, essentially every chapter gives a different point of view on the period. We hear something of law in the Middle Ages, then German Politics, then Art, then Literature, then Religion, then... In a sense that is obvious, except that in each of those chapters Cantor explains why the subject(s) of the chapter told us something about that aspect of the subject that was not at all obvious, that may be received wisdom now, but was not part of the worldview of academic history before 1900 or so.
- Secondly, Cantor wants us to realize that history is written by human beings. We learned these things about the Middle Ages because specific individuals with specific idiosyncrasies engaged in the hard work of research, then thought, then writing, to explain them to us. This knowledge did not derive from revelation, nor was it handed down from generation to generation, neither was it manufactured by state machinery or immense collectives; it was the product of one individual human at a time.
- Thirdly, each of those humans was different from the others. It's pretty much par for our times that the people who seem to hate this book most because it lacks "diversity" apparently never read it! Diversity is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. Color, gender, sexuality; those are what define diversity -- but god forbid we put any sort of importance on the diversity of the character or personalities of individuals. After all, it was Hitler, wasn't it, who said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
What stood out to ME from this cavalcade of characters is that anyone can be a Medieval historian if they're willing to put in the work. Aristocrat or peasant, born in Europe or outside it, gregarious or anti-social, child prodigy or late bloomer; all can do great work.
- Finally Cantor wants to make the point that how ideas play out is substantially dependent on contingent factors. The politics surrounding an author (maybe from choices made by that author, maybe pure randomness) may make it convenient for others to laud the work, or to avoid it. Charisma can give some authors a much louder megaphone than others. That's a fact, and pretending otherwise is bad history. And if you're an idiot, that's the end of the story, cue grievance studies.
But suppose you're not an idiot? Well, then, presumably you care more about the history than the petty issues of who gets the groupies and who doesn't. And Cantor's point is that, in the end, the work speaks for itself.
The author may have a happy or sad life, one successful (by some definition of success...) or not, prolific or not; may have many, few or no students, may leave (or barely even join) academia. But in the end we all die, only our works remain. And good works are recognized as good, live on, and provide value long after the lives that wrote the books.
If that fact of the world doesn't appeal to you, then perhaps you're going to be unhappy about ANYTHING to do with the realities of both history "long ago" and academic life in most fields....
January 5, 2024
Catty, self-indulgent, and partisan, this book doesn’t fill me with confidence about Cantor’s judgments, much less a desire to be his colleague. But it’s also written with a certain kind of literary flair and many interesting intimations of the ideas of the people he discusses. It seems this book would really like to be an academic roman a clef ala Ravelstein, and was enjoyable enough in that mode however unsure I am about it as historiography.
February 9, 2019
I don't share Norman Cantor's taste for psychoanalysis, but otherwise this is a fantastic, witty, even profound history of how our knowledge of the middle ages was produced over the last century and a half. There should be one like it for every academic discipline.
May 9, 2012
Amazing and entertaining account of the ideas, lives and personalities of the great 20th century medievalists who created our idea of the Middle Ages.
Cantor writes in an enagaging, if scattershot, style. The book is at its best when Cantor is talking about the scholars he knew personally, like Stayer, Powicke, Southern and Mommsen. We are also indirectly introduced to Cantor himself and his views on the issues in question.
It does have its flaws though, like the disorganized way most of the chapters are laid out. The worst is the final chapter which almost completely comes apart when Cantor goes off on tangents and makes predictions like how no one will again be interested in Mommsen's ideas on the crusading ideal in medieval Europe. In light of the decade long (or longer) confrontation between the Islamic world and the West, this prediction seems comical. Cantor's interest in the sex lives of medievalists borders on creepy and his gushing over Southern get tiresome pretty quickly. His classism, depicting Cornell as some backwoods hellhole and heaping scorn on "cow colleges" in the midwest also drags down an otherwise great book.
The greatest flaw of the book is his obsession with finding the great achievement of the Middle Ages. Southern is the greatest medievalist because he recognizes that this is the individualizing vision of the romanticists of the High Middle Ages. Is it possible to find a singular achievement of a period stretching close to 1,000 years? Is it necessary? Is it advisble?
Still, there is nothing else quite like this book. Reading it is like its own seminar in Medieval historiography. Anyone hoping to understand the Middle Ages needs to start with this book.
Cantor writes in an enagaging, if scattershot, style. The book is at its best when Cantor is talking about the scholars he knew personally, like Stayer, Powicke, Southern and Mommsen. We are also indirectly introduced to Cantor himself and his views on the issues in question.
It does have its flaws though, like the disorganized way most of the chapters are laid out. The worst is the final chapter which almost completely comes apart when Cantor goes off on tangents and makes predictions like how no one will again be interested in Mommsen's ideas on the crusading ideal in medieval Europe. In light of the decade long (or longer) confrontation between the Islamic world and the West, this prediction seems comical. Cantor's interest in the sex lives of medievalists borders on creepy and his gushing over Southern get tiresome pretty quickly. His classism, depicting Cornell as some backwoods hellhole and heaping scorn on "cow colleges" in the midwest also drags down an otherwise great book.
The greatest flaw of the book is his obsession with finding the great achievement of the Middle Ages. Southern is the greatest medievalist because he recognizes that this is the individualizing vision of the romanticists of the High Middle Ages. Is it possible to find a singular achievement of a period stretching close to 1,000 years? Is it necessary? Is it advisble?
Still, there is nothing else quite like this book. Reading it is like its own seminar in Medieval historiography. Anyone hoping to understand the Middle Ages needs to start with this book.
August 19, 2013
Inventing the Middle Ages is a history of history, as well as a raised glass to one's colleagues and ancestors. Norman Cantor surveys the works of the most influential, and even some of the marginal, medievalists of the 20th century. He shows that the mental picture that contemporary people (or at least medievalists) have of the Middle Ages was painstakingly crafted by the meticulous and imaginative yet highly personal labors of a handful of intellectuals.
Cantor's approach to his subjects is highly, sometimes oddly, psychological. Parallels abound between the lives of medievalists and the content of their works. Cantor unveils history writing as an enterprise fundamentally human, blessedly human, sometimes all too human. Cantor personally knows several of his subjects, and knows the rest through an intermediary. He is certainly not adverse to name-dropping and indulging a bit of gossip and speculation, but he is a gentleman, and his toast remains a tribute to others, not an opportunity for self-aggrandizement.
Inventing the Middle Ages is a rare book, not without flaws, but entirely without rival.
Cantor's approach to his subjects is highly, sometimes oddly, psychological. Parallels abound between the lives of medievalists and the content of their works. Cantor unveils history writing as an enterprise fundamentally human, blessedly human, sometimes all too human. Cantor personally knows several of his subjects, and knows the rest through an intermediary. He is certainly not adverse to name-dropping and indulging a bit of gossip and speculation, but he is a gentleman, and his toast remains a tribute to others, not an opportunity for self-aggrandizement.
Inventing the Middle Ages is a rare book, not without flaws, but entirely without rival.
October 9, 2013
Though I've no intention of concentrating on Medieval studies, I found this book very interesting. It was also very easy to understand, though perhaps the author had intended for the book to be understood easily. The concepts in the book, I think, aren't only exclusively applicable to Medieval history (and the invention of its image) but also to other Historical disciplines as well (for example, I think, Orientalism and how 'Othering' creates an image or a "type" for both the 'Othered' and the one who 'Others').
Finely written and highly recommended for those who want to be further informed of "historical trends" (basically academic-gossip).
Finely written and highly recommended for those who want to be further informed of "historical trends" (basically academic-gossip).
September 5, 2012
I liked it. The book looks at the different schools of thought and scholarship on the middle ages in each chapter and I felt my enjoyment of the book waxed and waned depending on the chapter and personalities of the scholars being presented. Also, I felt that Cantor's personal opinions got in the way a lot. I'd recommend it to someone who wants a more scholarly and snobbish look at the actually writing of the history on the middle ages but not for someone looking for a book on middle ages.
August 18, 2016
Informative and eye-opening about how manmade our visions of the past truly are and how alive historical study truly is. I have little background in medievalist studies so much of this flew over my head. However, I can pick up on the over use of outdated Freudian psychoanalysis when the author describes and contemplates the actions of these historians. It's annoying and makes me question much of what is written, however there is no doubt that the insider knowledge the author provides is invaluable and his personal anecdotes were the best part of this book.
July 31, 2015
This book is certainly interesting in places, but Cantor's presentation of the topic is too heavy on gossip and ultimately too meandering to be of interest to more than a few who are already knowledgeable about the historiography of the Middle Ages.
April 5, 2024
My fixation with medieval history started with Cantor's 'In the Wake of the Plague', elevated with 'Civilization of the Middle Ages' (the only non-fiction book I've read to date that actually had me very nearly ready, once finished, to go right back to the start and re-read as my next book), and recently had me read 14 books he recommended as a beginner reading list to the Middle Ages.
I understand there was quite some controversy surrounding this book when it came out, and I can see why. This is a history of Historians, a unique book from that perspective, and commentary on the important writers that have shaped the narrative of medieval history in the modern age. Cantor doesn't shy away from what could be percieved as very personal attacks on particular authors or their works. But for me, this book is illuminating in as much as it is a peek behind the academic curtain, so to speak. I'm somewhat glad my medieval reading is recreational rather than academic, to be honest, after reading this.
Cantor manages to also put in to perspective the evolution of academic thought on medieval studies, and gave me valuable background on many of the authors he'd recommended in his short reading list (and yes, I'm casually trying to chase up the long list). Without the training and rigour that academia can bring to bear on texts, a casual reader such as myself is somewhat at the mercy of writers who can bring their expertise on a particular subject. It takes a rare (or bold) writer to skewer writers arguments and assumptions, or declare works mostly redundant that a casual reader such as myself wouldn't have been able to intellectually grapple with with anything like the confidence or insight that someone like Cantor seems to be able to do.
In any event, I'm still along with the ride, and, for better or worse, I've hitched my ride with Cantor as my guide for the most part. One thing that I think can be said with little disagreement and that is that he is a very engaging writer, able to package the rarified air of academia and present it in a highly readable form, and that in itself is an achievement.
I understand there was quite some controversy surrounding this book when it came out, and I can see why. This is a history of Historians, a unique book from that perspective, and commentary on the important writers that have shaped the narrative of medieval history in the modern age. Cantor doesn't shy away from what could be percieved as very personal attacks on particular authors or their works. But for me, this book is illuminating in as much as it is a peek behind the academic curtain, so to speak. I'm somewhat glad my medieval reading is recreational rather than academic, to be honest, after reading this.
Cantor manages to also put in to perspective the evolution of academic thought on medieval studies, and gave me valuable background on many of the authors he'd recommended in his short reading list (and yes, I'm casually trying to chase up the long list). Without the training and rigour that academia can bring to bear on texts, a casual reader such as myself is somewhat at the mercy of writers who can bring their expertise on a particular subject. It takes a rare (or bold) writer to skewer writers arguments and assumptions, or declare works mostly redundant that a casual reader such as myself wouldn't have been able to intellectually grapple with with anything like the confidence or insight that someone like Cantor seems to be able to do.
In any event, I'm still along with the ride, and, for better or worse, I've hitched my ride with Cantor as my guide for the most part. One thing that I think can be said with little disagreement and that is that he is a very engaging writer, able to package the rarified air of academia and present it in a highly readable form, and that in itself is an achievement.
April 25, 2021
Though its title is probably an allusion to R. W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), the book is not a treatise on medieval times, but an essay on historians who in the period from 1895 to 1965 established medieval history as an autonomous scholarly field. The author of the book, Norman F. Cantor, a Canadian medievalist of Jewish origins, offers portraits of twenty prominent medievalists (8 British, 6 German, 3 French, 2 American, 1 Dutch).
It seems to me that Cantor wanted to distribute his space evenly between works and lives as similar biographies do, but as the book proceeds, it speaks less and less of works than of lives. Some might find this style gossipy, but I think that there is an underlying motive. In an earlier Cantor's article titled Medieval Historiography as Modern and Political Social Thought you can find these words: "This highly subjective quest for the true identity of the medieval period continues into the twentieth century. The historiography of the Middle Ages, perhaps inevitably, has been conditioned by a response to various twentieth-century needs and aspirations."
This earlier quote, quite surprising given Cantor's noticeable aversion for postmodern trends, represents a reasonable approach and reveals a deeper agenda which, I believe, informs his book. Such an approach without any doubt requires some work with gossip and intrusion into private lives. However, if my reading of his intentions is right, Cantor failed to deliver and the book frequently slips into the irritating "my personal impressions of the great medievalists many of whom I had a chance to meet." In other words, the book lacks analytical rigour.
I give it three stars because, on the other hand, I find it instructive for beginners. The book gives you some basic orientation, shows you the door, recommends further sources and, above all, it is reads well.
It seems to me that Cantor wanted to distribute his space evenly between works and lives as similar biographies do, but as the book proceeds, it speaks less and less of works than of lives. Some might find this style gossipy, but I think that there is an underlying motive. In an earlier Cantor's article titled Medieval Historiography as Modern and Political Social Thought you can find these words: "This highly subjective quest for the true identity of the medieval period continues into the twentieth century. The historiography of the Middle Ages, perhaps inevitably, has been conditioned by a response to various twentieth-century needs and aspirations."
This earlier quote, quite surprising given Cantor's noticeable aversion for postmodern trends, represents a reasonable approach and reveals a deeper agenda which, I believe, informs his book. Such an approach without any doubt requires some work with gossip and intrusion into private lives. However, if my reading of his intentions is right, Cantor failed to deliver and the book frequently slips into the irritating "my personal impressions of the great medievalists many of whom I had a chance to meet." In other words, the book lacks analytical rigour.
I give it three stars because, on the other hand, I find it instructive for beginners. The book gives you some basic orientation, shows you the door, recommends further sources and, above all, it is reads well.
May 14, 2021
More entertaining than any book on this subject has a right to be. To some extent this is because Cantor includes anecdotes from his own experiences with his subjects. Mostly it is because he can range from intensely critical and even dismissive to laudatory, sometimes within a few pages. Joe Strayer's command of Latin was marginal, we are told: "he probably could not read a philosophical or theological work written in ornate ecclesiastical Latin." Yet several pages later Cantor remembers that when he started assisting in Strayer's undergraduate classes he was "stunned by the brilliance and beautiful organization of his lectures."
Cantor considers the men (and one woman) he discusses great scholars, and their books formative, in some cases works of art. Yet he relentlessly trashes them and goes on at great length about the shortcomings of both authors and books. One might argue that he picks the books and scholars that have most influenced our modern view of what the Middle Ages was, whether or not he admires them. But Cantor calls these medievalists and their work "great" too many times for this to be convincing. Personally I think Cantor is just crotchety, opinionated, overly critical, and unafraid to say what he really thinks, yet at the same time willing to express unabashed admiration when he feels it. It makes for a dramatic and highly interesting read.
Cantor considers the men (and one woman) he discusses great scholars, and their books formative, in some cases works of art. Yet he relentlessly trashes them and goes on at great length about the shortcomings of both authors and books. One might argue that he picks the books and scholars that have most influenced our modern view of what the Middle Ages was, whether or not he admires them. But Cantor calls these medievalists and their work "great" too many times for this to be convincing. Personally I think Cantor is just crotchety, opinionated, overly critical, and unafraid to say what he really thinks, yet at the same time willing to express unabashed admiration when he feels it. It makes for a dramatic and highly interesting read.
September 20, 2019
Sporadically intriguing but not enough to really make me feel it worth my while. Way more biographical and psychoanalytical than I expected; definitely locked into the late 80’s in its attitudes—toward Marxism and feminism especially. Perhaps that’s not the only reason Cantor seems so dismissive? It seems like arrogance at times.
March 7, 2020
A very informative and entertaining reading. It summarizes the ideas and lives of medievalists, but also tells many anecdotes and makes very precise judgements about peoples, their ideas, environments, and times.
September 17, 2023
The picture of the middle ages which is vividly etched into our psyche was mostly invented by those who were rightly suppressed during the medieval period thus they called it the "dark ages" because it was the darkest time for those who aspire for the demise of humanity.
August 26, 2018
I found the armchair Freudianism, typical of Cantor’s time, to be annoying.
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