Volume 39, Number 9 · May 14, 1992
The Cantorbury Tales
By Robert Bartlett
Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century
by Norman F. Cantor
Morrow, 477 pp., $28.00
The Middle Ages, that period of European history stretching from the fall of the Roman Empire, around the year 500, to the time of Columbus, has left a heritage of institutions and images in the modern world, on both sides of the Atlantic. Representative bodies such as Congress and Parliament, the Anglo-American legal system, the idea of the corporate town, and the university all descend directly from innovations of the medieval period. We can look around us and see Gothic architecture in churches and on campuses, and Arthurian legend in movies and computer games. But a period of the past does not lie like a corpse on the mortuary slab, unmoving and naked to the observer's eye. The past has to be created by the active work of selection, representation, and animation carried on by those who specialize in the task—in our society that means historians. What Norman Cantor has done is to write a book about the historians of the last hundred years who were responsible for creating the current idea or image of the medieval period—for 'inventing the Middle Ages.'
Review, 4637 words
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