Rating: 
Summary: The bibliography the only saving grace
Review: a magisterial history not only of the Middle Ages, but of our century and our need to invent a "MIddle Ages." Required reading
for historians and general readers. Chapter on Lord of the Rings
is fascinating. Powerful cultural history.
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining Historiography
Review: Entertaining historiography should be an oxymoron but this book is an exception. Cantor's point of departure is the fact that historical understanding of the Middle Ages is essentially a 20th century phenomenon. According to Cantor, and this is creditable, very little written on this topic prior to 1900 is useful. In this book, Cantor is concerned with exposing the connections between 20th century concerns and ideas and study of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. This is not a systematic historiography. Cantor reviews the lives and works of a substantial number of prominent scholars on a case by case basis and doesn't attempt to develop any general scheme or description of the evolution of scholarship in this area. Cantor shows how the personal and ideological preoccupations of these scholars colored or directed their work. The pioneering German students of medieval kingship, Schramm and Kantorowicz, were members of the radical right who detested the Weimar Republic. Their longing for a charismatic leader who would restore German hegemony was reflected in their groundbreaking biographies of important German emperors. Their wishes for a modern charismatic leader were granted, but in a form they came to regret. Cantor does not view these scholars and the other individuals he discusses as simply imposing reflections of their contemporary preoccupations on the past. Rather, the contemporary preoccupations often lead to important insights. The great student of medieval monastic life, David Knowles, was himself a monk with significant personal conflicts over his vocation and strained relationships with his ecclesiastical superiors. These conflicts appear to have equipped Knowles with a unique ability to penetrate the psychology of medieval religous life. Implict in Cantor's descriptions is the idea that no single scholar or group of scholars is able to describe the medieval world wholly. The existence of contemporary preoccupations, conflicts, and ideologies leads to multiple different ideas of the past,ultimately generating complementary truths. Cantor is not a relativist and clearly believes that some approximation of historical truth is obtainable and in fact, has been obtained to some extent.
In terms of the fairness of Cantor's individual portraits, only someone with Cantor's knowledge of the literature and the personalities involved can really judge the accuracy of his analyses. I have enough knowledge to make a reasonable judgement about some of his portraits. His discussions of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien are insightful. His description of the remarkably competent American scholars Charles Haskins and Joseph Strayer as functioning within the Progessive tradition seems to me to be right on the mark. On the other hand, some of the discussion of the Annalist School of French social historians is less evenhanded and at times is more of a denunciation than an analysis. Cantor knew a fair number of these individuals and is not above indulging in gossip. He is also a very good writer and this book reads very easily. An additional good feature is that Cantor includes an appendix with a list of essential books about the Medieval World.
Rating:
Summary: fascinating and well-written overview of historians
Review: I found this book well-written, informative and unusual in that it gives both the story of the great historians of the 20th century with the relevance of their research for their own times and a clear idea of their work and ideas. It gives an historic 'who's who' in this little academic world and lots of suggestions of what to read on medieval history. I greatly enjoyed this book.
Rating: 
Summary: The ventings of a historian-turned-crank....
Review: I'm not extremely knowledgable about the Middle Ages, much less the scholars that interpreted them, but Cantor's work left me feeling much more informed and eager to read some of the primary sources.Cantor tells the story of the lives of "the great medievalists of the 20th century" and shows how their context--historical, cultural, religious, family, academic, etc.--affected their scholarship. (I kept wondering what someone would write about Cantor in a few decades! *grin*) He obviously interacted personally with many of these "greats." I'm not sure if I learned more about the Middle Ages or the twentieth century but I know I learned alot about both. In either case, this work is well worth reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Creative Non-Fiction and a little Historiography
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: How and Why History is Written and Who Writes It
Review: Inventing the Middle Ages is a behind the scenes view of the development of an academic discipline over the course of a century, the 20th Century. The author,Norman Cantor, is a distinguished participant and observer, who unquestionably loves his subject, the Middle Ages, to which he has devoted his life and career. He makes no claim of objectivity. He is passionate about the men and women who created and shaped our beliefs and images of the Middle Ages during the 20th Century. He knew and knows many of them intimately as people and portrays them as very fallible human beings. The great names of medievalists known to all of us, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and those known to those of us who studied the subject in college, such as Maitland, Panofsky, Huizinga, Southern and Bloch, to name only a few, are brought to life, warts and all. Their thoughts, their methods, their habits, their appearances, their prejudices, their heroic and cowardly acts in the face of war and persection and all the other aspects of their lives and works are vividly painted. Many of these professors turn out to be unforgettable personalities, such as the Jewish Nazi sympathizer, right wing assassin and dandy, Ernst Kantorowicz, who managed to tear himself away from the protection of his friend Hermann Goering and leave Germany at the last opportune moment in order to make a comfortable career for himself in the US under the color of refugeedom. As odious as his political views and behavior might seem, his genuine and lasting contribution to our understanding of the medieval monarchy is explained and respected by Cantor. It is a tribute to Cantor that even after reading about Kantorowicz's great and good friend Percy Ernst Schramm's participation in the Nazi regime and his chillingly smug memoir of Hitler published long after the war (and still in print), that one still can see the value of Schramm's earlier Utopian analysis of the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and regret that there is no English translation of this classic after more than 70 years. Academic warfare and empire-building are indelibly described. Yet through it all we never lose sight of the actual contributions to their discipline and our world of these distinctive and distinguished individuals. Most touching of all is the brief, eloquent and sad memoir of Cantor's mentor Theodor Mommsen, the only major non Jewish German medievalist to reject Nazi Germany. It would help to have some knowledge of things medieval. Some of the more abstruse underpinnings of genres of historiography such as Panofsky's formalism remain murky, at least to this reader. Sometimes Cantor's bile gets spilled a little too bitingly as in his snide remarks on the work of John Boswell, the late Yale historian of gay medieval life. Nevertheless this is a major work that should be read by anyone interested in the uses of history and how is it that our understanding of the past depends in large part on how we view the present. Its defects are far outweighed by its virtues. This is one of those books that make you want to go forth and read more deeply and that is what counts the most.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a history of the Middle Ages
Review: It is important to realize that, as the title implies, this is not a history of the Middle Ages; it IS a history of the history of the Middle Ages. That is to say this book is a description of about 20 historians of the twentieth century in Medieval studies, and how they interpreted the Middle Ages of Europe. Despite what the dust jacket comments say, it is certainly not an accessible book for the general public, as a firm understanding of historiographical and interpretive methods and jargon is required as background in order to make sense of this study. I also point out that Cantor is very opinionated!
Rating:
Summary: The bibliography the only saving grace
Review: It's generally acknowldged among medievalists that Norman Cantor can be a good scholar. It is also acknowldged that this book is basically a scorched-earth screed, by which Cantor tries to "get even" with many in the field, living and dead. For instance, in the 1997 preface to Kantorowicz's magisterial "The King's Two Bodies," William C. Jordan mentions that Kantorowicz's life had been "written and rewritten by intelligent admirers and at least one crank" (p. xi). In the footnotes, this book is included. While Jordan was tactful enough to leave unsaid which authors fell under which description, those familiar with intra-field politics are fully aware of which author is the "crank." I must agree with the reader from Silicon Valley, USA: this work truly is the venting of a bitter academic. Generally speaking, the one great merit of this book is giving the aspiring medievalist (like myself) the names of some of the more important scholars in twentieth-century medieval studies. The bibliography is also helpful in this regard. The actual text, however, is far more questionable. When Cantor isn't sneering about this scholar or that, he gives the reader his trite psychoanalysis of other scholars. If one feeling pulses through this work, it is Cantor's arrogance. A shame, really - he could do much better. Instead, he tried to settle scores. And thus, among many medievalists, his name is a curse.
Rating:
Summary: The title was apt
Review: It's unfortunate that some people see part of a title and not the full title of a book. I thought this was a great book. It was interesting reading. I started it out with initial doubts, next thing I know I'm halfway through the book. Once I started reading, I realized he was trying to answer three questions: 1) want current events affected the historian's point of view towards his research, 2) how was the historian influenced by his peers 3) what goals did the historian hope to reach during his life. It was obvious that current events influence all of us, as much as our peers do. But what constitutes a good or a bad historian? These are the questions that he answer, from his perspective.
Rating:
Summary: A waste of time
Review: Norman Cantor's book, "Inventing the Middle Ages," hardly deserves being classified as non-fiction. The main feature of this work is Cantor's inability to prove any of his assertions. Instead of resting on solid arguments and dealing with the core beliefs of the historians he attempts to critique, he rests upon immature insults and a bizarre, ineffective attempt at providing an historical context to their works. Cantor displays more of his own biases, from his individual center, right wing version of history to his repetitive complaints about the homosexuality of various historians. Cantor's work fails to provide the historical context, the historical tradition or explain the vivid historiography of medieval writings. Above all else, this book is uninteresting, uninformed, and intensely monotonous. I am highly skeptical of the selection process by which Cantor adjudges the who's who of medieval historians.
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