Inventing the Middle Ages

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......more

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 w......more

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, k......more

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 rai......more

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 medievalis......more