Inventing the Middle Ages

By Norman F. Cantor

Book Overview

INVENTING THE MIDDLE AGESThe Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth CenturyIn this ground-breaking work, Norman Cantor explains how our current notion of the Middle... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0688094066
• ISBN13: 9780688094065
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 477 Pages
• Weight: 1.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Interesting, Informative

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...

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...

Eye Opening Histoiography

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...

Creative Non-Fiction and a little Historiography

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...