Inventing The Middle Ages by Norman F. Cantor
The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century
This book argues that our image of medieval Europe is largely a modern construction: successive generations of scholars, artists, and political movements have reshaped and reinvented the Middle Ages to serve their own intellectual needs and agendas. Tracing developments from Renaissance humanism through Enlightenment critique, Romantic nationalism, nineteenth-century scholarship, and twentieth-century ideological uses, it shows how myths, scholarly fashions, and propaganda produced competing and often contradictory portraits of medieval life, institutions, and ideas. The work critiques both Romantic idealization and denigrating caricature, explains how medievalism influenced modern culture and politics, and urges a more nuanced, self-aware historiography that separates evidence from later invention.
- Published
- 1991
- Nationality
- American
- Length
- Unknown
- Pages
- Unknown
- Original Language
- English
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