Inventing the Middle Ages

Full of good information about major medieval historians and their contributions to the field, and how their personal lives affected their understanding of history. However, Norman Cantor has a tendency to get carried away and make really broad overgeneralizations or exaggerations, and I never

quite trust him. This book is full of Cantor's assessments of historians' works and personalities, and his view isn't always the generally-accepted view. This book is a good starting point, but should be followed with some further reading to get a better-rounded view.

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LibraryThing member Stbalbach

I've resisted reading this for years because of the negative reviews of "gossip", but now wish I had sooner.

If for no other reason the list of 125 essential medieval history books in the appendix is worth having. Or, if your a Tolkien fan and want to learn about the real-world connections between

Middle Earth and the Middle Ages. Or if you've ever tried reading "Wanning of the Middle Ages", or Sutherland's "The Making of the Middle Ages" and didn't get what all the fuss is about. Cantor puts it all into historical perspective and context and arms the reader with the knowledge needed to approach these books from a high level understanding.

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LibraryThing member dulac3

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.

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LibraryThing member lisanicholas

Focuses on lives & works of 20 c. medievalists. Interesting and useful, but somewhat tendentious -- for instance, Cantor finds it suspicious and peculiar that Tolkien and Lewis wore tweed and never underwent psychotherapy. Who's the weird one?

LibraryThing member TimONeill

A rather gossipy examination of how it was historians of the Twentieth Century who established medieval studies as a set of historical and critical disciplines after centuries of neglect. Even though the work of these scholars is only just beginning to enter popular consciousness (which still holds

the Nineteenth Century view of the period as a "dark age"), it was people like Southern, Bloc, Strayer and Haskins who laid the foundations for future study.

How exactly J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis made Cantor's list is more of a mystery. As excellent as their work was, it wasn't in the same league as the others in the book in terms of influence. I suspect Cantor had his eye on non-academic book buyers (most of whom would never have heard of Haskins let alone read Maitland).

Nonetheless, a great book and a brilliant history of a field of history.

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LibraryThing member antiquary

Very lively personal views, but not always fair

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