Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century

This book is a study of 19th and 20th century historians of the Middle Ages and how they have created our points of view. I really enjoyed this work, at least up to a point. Not having read all the writers Cantor examined, I can't say whether he was entirely fair to them all, but it gives the impression of fairness, and anyway I won't live long enough to read most of them. It is true that if most of what history is autobiographical projection (which is what the book is about) then the idea that most of the public has about learning is wrong. The pursuit of truth and knowledge has turned into a walk through a chamber of mirrors. We like authors who say agreeable things, things that affirm our points of view and emotional dispositions. It's more a pursuit of pleasure than of truth. I suppose one is closer to the truth as the realization grows that no one really knows much of anything. Nevertheless, this is an interesting study and well worth reading. Cantor is an incisive critic with a rich sense of irony and a very sturdy sense about what is fair and balanced. He finds the value in writers of every political persuasion from the far left to far right. Though I think the occasional Freudian analysis in some of the biographies seems a little dated, other than that, I thought it was, as they say, richly entertaining.

Sure, it's filled with gossip and provocative (and sometimes glib) generalities. That's what makes it such a pleasure to read. It's a little like getting invited to have a couple of beers with your indiscreet, cantankerous, opinionated but lovable dissertation advisor, after passing your qualifying exams. Please, kiddo, call me Norm. There's no question Cantor goes way over the top in places, as was his wont. Probably the most notorious instance was his labeling Ernst Kantorowicz a Nazi. Since Eka was a Jew who fled Germany in 1938, this is more than a bit of a stretch. The evidence? Eka was a fan of the poet Stefan George, and we all know the George Circle "prefigured" Nazism. Also Kantorowicz wrote admiringly of Emperor Frederick II and of kingship during the Weimar Republic. Other tid-bits: his biography of Frederick appeared with a swastika on the cover and, alarmed by the threat of a communist take-over in 1918, he briefly joined the Free Corps. But it is virtually out of thin air that Cantor concludes that, save for the accident of birth, Eka would have become a Nazi. As for Percy Schramm, the other "Nazi Twin," "there is essentially no difference between him and Albert Speer." Schramm was appointed official historian of the Wehrmacht's General Staff in 1943. He had the rank of major. He was not a member of the Nazi Party. Go figure. But apart from these outrageous asides and a misconception that the German Empire in 1871 was half-Protestant and half-Catholic (OK, and a highly idiosyncratic definition of "German Idealism"), the chapter is an engaging account of the careers of the two scholars and a lively if very abbreviated summary of their orientations as historians. In another chapter, Cantor writes that the two leading American medievalists of their generations, Haskins and Strayer, "were Woodrow Wilson duplicated and reincarnated." Well, OK. But this doesn't prevent him from providing an entertaining and acute reminiscence of Strayer, Cantor's dissertation advisor. (When he turned the thing in after four years, Strayer's only response was, "It's OK. I'll schedule your defense.") You can take or leave his definition of "Wilsonianism." "A reader," who comments below, failed to read the book's subtitle: "The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century." This is not supposed to be a sophisticated work of historiography. It's a collection of anecdotes and apercus, some whifty but some right-on, along with summaries of the oeuvres and of the legacies of twenty legendary historians. Even if you're a fan of the Annales school (and by the way, there's no reason to believe Cantor's animus toward the school has anything to do with envy of the sex-lives of its stars), you'll probably enjoy this book. Unless, of course, you happen to be a medievalist. No other historian I can think of would have the chutzpah to publish a book like this. Cantor will be missed.

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.

If you were a history major like me at the University of Delaware in the late 70's, you discovered that your love of the subject is soon yanked away and replaced by something called historiography. This is dismaying, because instead of reading history, you are sent to the library to look up historians. You have to write long papers about who said what and why, which makes you drink Schmidt's beer to excess. You start writing bad poems, because you can't stand to read poorly-written analyses of other people's writing. If you wanted to do that, you could have been an English major. I only wish this book had been out in 1978. Cantor writes well, has encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, has a sense of humor (which some people are mistaking for bitterness) and is not afraid to take a stand. His chapter on the Oxford Fantastists is excellent, informative, and something anyone interested in our current culture ought to read, since Tolkein and Lewis did much to form it. Cantor's book is really creative non-fiction; the use of novelistic techniques in a non-fiction narrative, which to me, makes the book more readable, interesting, and more accurate. If you've spent no time around universities, then you can't understand how their internal politics shape thought and education, which Cantor shows perfectly well here. I suppose some people bought this book expecting a history of the Middle Ages; shame on them for not reading the title, or looking inside the book. Cantor's Civilazation of the Middle Ages is a good place to start if you're looking for that. If you want to read about the historians who formed the current view of those strange times (less strange than our own) this is a good place to start.