Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century

The Middle Ages, in our 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 these presuppositions are in fact constructs of the twentieth century. Through close study of the lives and works of twenty of the twentieth century's most prominent medievalists, Cantor examines how the genesis of this fantasy arose in the scholars' spiritual and emotio...