Inventing the Middle Ages

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 480 pages
• Published by: Harper Perennial
• Edition: 1st Edition February 26, 1993
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0688123023
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0688123024
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

From The Washington Post
"Provocative . . . Exhilarating . . . A highly impassioned and personal book--and the better for it"

Product Review
"Astoundingly readable Extraordinarily powerful" -- -- The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Brilliant No other book published this year is more witty and challenging." -- -- Houston Chronicle

"Grandly conceived and brilliantly executed it is the best book about historians I have read in years" -- -- Gordon Craig, Professor Emeritus of History, Stanford University

Reader Reviews
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.