Inventing The Middle Ages : The Lives, Works, And Ideas Of The Great Medievalists Of The Twentieth C Av Norman F. Cantor

The Middle Ages, inour cultural imagination, are besieged with ideas of wars, tournaments,plagues, saints and kings, knights, lords and ladies. In his era-defining work,Inventing the Middle Ages, Norman Cantor shows that thesepresuppositions are in fact constructs of the twentieth century. Through closestudy of the lives and works of twenty of the twentieth century''s mostprominent medievalists, Cantor examines how the genesis of this fantasyarose in the scholars'' spiritual and emotional outlooks, which influenced theirportrayals of the Middle Ages. In the course of this vigorous scrutiny of theirscholarship, he navigates the strong personalities and creative minds involvedwith deft skill.Written with bothstudents and the general public in mind, Inventing the Middle Ages providedan alternative framework for the teaching of the humanities. Revealing theinterconnection between medieval civilisation, the culture of the twentiethcentury and our own assumptions, Cantor provides a unique standpoint bothforwards and backwards. As lively and engaging today as when it was firstpublished in 1991, his analysis offers readers the core essentials of thesubject in an entertaining and humorous fashion.