Inventing the Middle Ages
Cantor, Norman F.
T he curious layman will not be blamed for thinking that maybe he ought to read up on the Middle Ages themselves before delving into this study of twentieth-century medievalists. In fact, this book...
...World War II was a crucial influence on J.R.R...
...The Marxian Annalists thus went unchallenged in their takeover of medievalism, a catastrophe so great that Cantor deems Southern's decision an act of criminal cowardice...
...Augustine to Freud, and St...
...Cantor savages the character of another mentor he claims to venerate...
...He approves of "popularizers" like Barbara Tuchman and Umberto Eco and considers the ability to tell an absorbing story indispensable to the historian: The aristocratic Frankish women—with whom the lords and knights diurnally copulated in the high-ceilinged wooden feasting halls among the packs of dogs and heaped garbage bones of countless red-meat roasted dinners—if only to save themselves from constant pregnancies and early deaths in the roulette experiences of perilous childbirth, had begun to urge their masters and sons to fabled and valiant'deeds of heroic romance in distant exotic climes...
...In his study of that less "provocative" subject, he developed an anti-ideological theory of literature, resistant to the cultural doctrines of National Socialism and to totalitarianism in general...
...Short, ugly, and plebeian, Powicke "looked like one of Tolkien's hobbits," and "just wanted to join a good London club...
...Used in reference to academia, such rhetoric is more than a little overblown...
...Notwithstanding the bitter internecine struggles among the medievalists, Cantor has great hopes for the discipline—hopes that transcend scholarship...
...This is not a casual error...
...Here and there the reader also learns specific, highly repeatable facts, such as the name of the one and only English pope (Adrian IV, ne Nicholas Breakspear...
...Emphasizing the similarities, he compares St...
...One version was that she had broken off their affair...
...Cantor rues "the decline of the social visibility of the historical profession," deplores the Annalists, and blames yet another of his teachers, Joseph Strayer, for allowing the Annalists to take over Princeton's history department...
...for instance, that the Mafia was founded by partisans of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II...
...There is some intriguing conjecture, too...
...Which is not to say that the Victorians' successors approached their subject with scientific objectivity...
...To his zealous disciples, this book was "a revelation, the Gospel According to Sir Richard, a liberation, an epiphany...
...At the same time, Oxford's Frederick Maurice Powicke conjured a "Proustian dream vision . . . of the high aristocracy" in his study of Henry III (1946...
...According to the dust jacket, Cantor is today "a professor of history, sociology, comparative literature, and law at New York University...
...0 78 The American Spectator May 1992...
...As for the flower children, they embraced Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings because it identified evil with "mechanistic domination . . . the world of machines that strangle life and goodness...
...Frustrated in his attempts to raise the intellectual level of his religious community—and perhaps frustrated in his attempts to have sex with the novices—Knowles was a visionary marginalized by the intransigent, pre—Vatican II Church...
...the location of the WC in the Bodleian Library ("hidden behind a door marked 'School of Oriental Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...He predicts a wave of "retromedievalism" for the twenty-first century, when the defunct values of modernism, socialism, and capitalism will be replaced by the most essential elements of the medieval legacy: i.e., a "remote and disengaged state" and a "sentimental formalism" in culture and personal behavior...
...Cantor, who analyzes his subjects to some extent along Freudian lines, might have done the same to himself in this case...
...Yet the author was responding not only to personal circumstances but also to world events...
...In Hitler's Germany, Ernst Robert Curtius conducted a "subtle resistance to Nazism from within," maintaining his chair at the University of Bonn by switching his field from modern French to medieval Latin...
...Cantor finds Lewis's appeal in his message of "the goodness and beauty of common acts in everyday life," a medieval idea that suited a humbled postwar Britain as it does Middle America today...
...Yet the author declined his role as the evangelical leader of a new academic sect (which would have included Cantor...
...The professor killed himself more than thirty years ago, for reasons that have never been made public...
...It was Strayer's insufficient "resolve to oppose" Bloch's successors in the 1960s that doomed the department to its position a decade later as "the American center of the Annalist school...
...Certainly this is a more titillating account of the First Crusade than most of us received in ninth grade...
...Out of the medieval Norse, Celtic, and Grail legends, they conjured fantasies of revenge and recovery, an ethos of return and triumph...
...In "the bitter, depleted world" of "post-hegemonic" Britain, they looked to the distant past for inspiration—in both their fiction and their literary scholarship...
...Bernard of Clairvaux...
...Languages...
...Only in the creative word," Curtius wrote, is the mind "inits perfect freedom: above concept, above doctrine, above precept...
...Moreover, it was not until the turn of this century that the necessary archival resources had been accumulated and organized...
...True, the Romantics and the Victorians were fond of the Middle Ages, but their visions were distorted by "ideological projections": idealism in the former case...
...For it is anger that enlivens—and perhaps motivated—this book...
...Richard Southern wrote a revolutionary book in the fifties that emphasized the romantic and individualistic character of twelfth-century culture...
...Many Catholics will have their reservations about this portrayal, but it is refreshing to watch a non-Catholic defend a rebellious cleric on the grounds not of enlightened liberal social values but of medieval theology, with knowledgeable references to Ailred of Rievaulx and St...
...One has to wonder if there was something else at stake, something more personal, to explain Cantor's anger...
...Despite their many similarities, including Christian and cultural conservatism, Lewis and Tolkien found vastly different popular audiences: middle-class, religious traditionalists in the one case, and the youth of the sixties counterculture in the other...
...C antor knows that academic reputation is shaped by factors other than sheer merit...
...This image is entirely a twentieth-century creation...
...another that she died...
...they "fashioned their interpretations of the Middle Ages out of the emotional wellsprings of their lives," which were inevitably affected by the century's social and political upheavals, particularly the world wars...
...In fact, this book serves well as an introduction to the period, with a summary of European history from the fourth century through the fourteenth, and passages on poetry, art and architecture, philosophy and theology, agriculture, and the common law...
...The ethos of the Franciscans, he says, was the same as that of "New Left communes of the 1960s and the Woodstock generation...
...Thomas Aquinas to the architects of the New Deal—arguable if lopsided analogies both...
...This vision is as vague as it is hopeful, and conspicuously lacking a feature that defines the Middle Ages for many: namely, religious faith...
...But looking through the volumes of the library that the deceased had bequeathed him, Cantor found letters that suggested the possibility that "his suicide was occasioned by the end of a homoerotic relationship" with another famous historian...
...This is an estimable position, to be sure, but the action of Inventing the Middle Ages takes place on a plane of academic prestige one or two levels higher—at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Princeton—and Cantor, keenly aware of the "depressing conditions within the sociology of academia," must resent, at the end of a distinguished career, that academia's higher perches have eluded him...
...There is no obvious reason for the inclusion of this information...
...With loving sons like this, one is tempted to ask, who needs patricides...
...One academic whose personal reputation will suffer from this book is a distinguished historian whom Cantor calls "my teacher and friend, a man I loved much more than my own father...
...Cantor thinks that this epic—"one of the enduring classics of English literature" and "the most extended and difficult piece of pseudomedievalism ever imagined"—will ensure that Tolkien's fame outlasts Lewis's...
...There was talk," Cantor reports, "that there had been a woman, the wife of a German classicist at Johns Hopkins, whom he loved...
...it bespeaks a certain limitation in Cantor's own judgment that we must bear in mind as we read his often shrewd, and usually entertaining, assessment of his peers...
...nationalism, deterministic organicism, and racist social Darwinism" in the latter...
...Tolkien and C. S. Lewis as well...
...To understand how Cantor can conceive of this we must go back to the front of the book, where he states that medieval civilization "stands toward our postmodern culture as the conjunctive other, the intriguing shadow, the marginally distinctive double, the secret sharer of our dreams and anxieties...
...the "canonization" of Marc Bloch, founder of the Annalist school of social historians, is a case study...
...Then he makes an equation that betrays his blindness on this point...
...The distinction between a life of consecrated poverty and a rock concert, between charity and hedonism, should be obvious, and it is hardly marginal...
...While the authors Cantor treats are, with a couple of exceptions, neither popularizers nor household names, their work has determined the image of the Middle Ages that is propagated in bookstores and lecture halls...
...In a totalitarian age, an explanation of politics that stressed dynasty rather than party, and bonds of loyalty rather than ideology, displayed "a saving rationality...
...and the artist Frank Stella's undergraduate major at Princeton (history...
...Cantor devotes twenty-one pages to defending David Knowles, a Benedictine monk who left the abbey for a Cambridge professorship and the company of a female psychoanalyst...
...He made, in Dante's term, the 'great refusal.— Il gran rifiuto, in the Inferno, is the offense for which Pope Celestine V, after abdicating in favor of the discreditable Boniface VIII, lands in Hell...
...Instead of cramming his short surveys with dates, Norman Cantor uses learned generalizations and vivid word-pictures...
...Cantor does not dispute Bloch's heroism as a leader of the French resistance, which led to his "martyrdom" at the hands of the Gestapo, but argues that his successors cultivated Bloch as an "intellectual deity," reciting his name as a "symbolic talisman" in their takeover INVENTING THE MIDDLE AGES: THE LIVES, WORKS, AND IDEAS OF THE GREAT MEDIEVALISTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Norman F. Cantor William Morrow & Co./477 pages /$28 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA The American Spectator May 1992 77 of the French, and then the American, historical establishment...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
