Ted's Reviews > Inventing the Middle Ages

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.