Cantor, Norman F. 1929–2004

(Norman Frank Cantor)

PERSONAL: Born 1929, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; died of heart failure, September 18, 2004, in Miami, FL; naturalized U.S. citizen, 1968; married, 1957; wife's name Mindy; children: Judy, Howard. Education: University of Manitoba, B.A. (with honors), 1951; Princeton University, M.A., 1953, Ph.D., 1957; attended Oxford University, 1954–55.

CAREER: Historian. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor of history, c. 1958–60; Columbia University, New York, NY, 1960–66, began as associate professor, became professor of history, chair of department, 1963–65; Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, professor, 1966–68, Leff Professor of History, 1968–70, director of graduate program in comparative history, 1966–69; State University of New York—Binghamton, Binghamton, NY, distinguished professor of history, 1970–76, chair of department, 1970–74, provost for graduate studies and research, 1974–75, vice president for academic affairs, 1975–76; University of Illinois—Chicago Circle, Chicago, IL, professor of history and vice-chancellor for academic affairs, 1976–78; New York University, New York, NY, professor of history, beginning 1978, dean of faculty of arts and science, beginning 1978, professor emeritus, 1999–2004. Visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, 1950, Yeshiva University, 1960–61, 1963–64, and Brooklyn College of City University of New York, 1972–74; Fulbright professor at Tel Aviv University; public speaker. Member of doctoral council, State of New York, beginning 1979.

MEMBER: Royal Historical Society (fellow), New York University Society of Fellows.

AWARDS, HONORS: Rhodes Scholar; American Council of Learned Societies fellow, 1960; LL.D. from University of Winnipeg, 1973; fellow, Royal Historical Society, 1974; National Book Critics Circle nomination, 1991, for Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century; New York Public Library Award, 1997.

WRITINGS:

Church, Kingship, and Lay Investiture, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1958.

Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1963, revised and expanded edition published as The Civilization of the Middle Ages, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1993.

(With R. Schneider) How to Study History, Crowell (New York, NY), 1967.

The English, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1968.

Western Civilization, two volumes, Scott, Foresman (New York, NY), 1969.

The Age of Protest, Hawthorn Books (New York, NY), 1969.

Perspectives on the European Past, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1971.

The Meaning of the Middle Ages, Allyn & Bacon (Boston, MA), 1973.

Legal Frontiers of Death and Dying, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1987.

Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1988, revised and expanded edition (with Mindy Cantor) published as The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century, William Morrow (New York, NY), 1991.

Advance Directives and the Pursuit of Death with Dignity, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1993.

Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Ages, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1997.

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made, Free Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Inventing Norman Cantor: Confessions of a Medievalist, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Tempe, AZ), 2002.

Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2003, published as Antiquity: From the Birth of Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire, Perennial (New York, NY), 2004.

The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era, Free Press (New York, NY), 2004.

(With Dee Ranieri) Alexander the Great: Journey to the End of the Earth, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2005.

EDITOR

The Medieval World, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1963, 2nd edition, 1968.

William Stubbs on the English Constitution, Crowell (New York, NY), 1966.

The Structure of European History, six volumes, Crowell (New York, NY), 1968.

The History of Popular Culture, two volumes, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1968.

The English Tradition, two volumes, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1968.

Monuments of Western Thought, four volumes, Blaisdell (New York, NY), 1969–70.

Problems in European History, three volumes, Crowell (New York, NY), 1970.

The Medieval Reader, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

The Jewish Experience, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.

The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, Viking (New York, NY), 1999.

Contributor to Essays on the Reconstruction of Medieval History, edited by V. Mudroch and G. Crouse, McGill University Press (Montreal, Canada), 1964.

Editor of series, "General Studies in History," General Learning Press (Morristown, NJ); "Crosscurrents in World History," Dial (New York, NY); "New Dimensions in History," John Wiley (New York, NY); and "Ideas and Institutions," Macmillan (New York, NY), 1963, 2nd edition, 1968. Contributor of articles and reviews to history and political science journals. Member of editorial board of American Journal of Legal History, 1971–75.

SIDELIGHTS: Norman F. Cantor blended a distinguished academic career as a medieval scholar with an equally successful writing career. His textbook The Civilization of the Middle Ages, a completely revised and expanded edition of Medieval History: The Life and Death of a Civilization, has proved to be popular with students and lay readers alike over the years, and his score of other books on medieval topics as well as on Jewish subjects and contemporary America have both won awards and critical accolades and have sparked controversy. Several of his books, including Medieval History, Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Ages, The Medieval Reader, and The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, have also been book club selections.

After earning his doctorate from Princeton University in 1957, Cantor settled into an academic career, teaching at schools from Princeton to Columbia University before going to New York University in 1978, where he remained for the rest of his career. His popularity as an author began with his third book, Medieval History, published in 1963 by a mainstream publisher rather than a university press, a volume Cantor later revised and expanded into The Civilization of the Middle Ages and which has remained in print for more than forty years. The new edition includes current research and is focused on more contemporary concerns, such as the woman's role in society, family history, and religious concerns such as piety and heresy. Known for his graceful and fluid prose style, Cantor also has been praised by critics for the narrative drive of his books. Reviewing The Civilization of the Middle Ages in Booklist, Brad Hooper found that there was "no better explanation of medievalism … available to the general reader."

Twentieth-century medievalists are profiled in Cantor's 1991 Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. Cantor maintains that men such as Frederic Maitland, Erwin Panofsky, C.S. Lewis, and Richard Southern are responsible for the way readers now view the Middle Ages, with a stress on its "synthesis of faith and reason, charismatic leadership of saints and heroes, formalist attitude to art and literature, and ideas of divine and human love," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. The same critic called the book a "sometimes provocative study." Writing in Historian, W.M Ormrod noted that Cantor provides a "broad, detailed, perceptive, and hard-hitting survey," and that it "is likely to raise a considerable debate, not least because of the salacious scandal that it spreads about certain supposedly saintly scholars of the twentieth century." Ormrod concluded that the book was a "magnificent achievement."

Profiles of medieval men and women also appear in Cantor's Medieval Lives. Included in the survey are "lively and engaging portraits of five men and three women," according to a contributor for Publishers Weekly. These include Helena Augusta, the mother of Constantine the Great, the Duke of Bedford, Hildegard of Bingen, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, among others. Reviewing the title in Commonweal, Carl L. Bankston III applauded the idea of "putting people, as sources and interpreters of all social phenomena, back at the center of historical study," but felt that the invented dialogue and conversations Cantor employs for this purpose were a mistake. "This kind of ventriloquism is a delicate business," wrote Bankston, "since speaking through the mouths of others risks reducing them to wooden dummies. Unfortunately, while he writes well, Cantor does not have the skill as a dramatist to avoid this danger." However, a Publishers Weekly critic noted that though Cantor employs "fictionalized conversations, his reconstructions rest on solid research and result in compelling depictions of important medieval thinkers." Booklist's Gilbert Taylor noted that these often-neglected millennia are turned into an era "of substance in Cantor's hands," and further found that Cantor's "supple, approachable conversations [are] based on firm erudition."

Cantor takes on the rather ambitious subject of the history of the Jewish people in The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, a "searching, captivating history … [that] is bound to be controversial," according to a critic for Publishers Weekly. Using recent archaeological research, he calls into doubt the biblical origins of the Jewish people featuring Abraham and Moses, calling this a "romantic fantasy." His narrative history traces the Jewish people through the Roman empire, into medieval Christendom, following the mix of Arabs and Jews in Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean, through the Jewish reformation and into the modern era with assimilation in Europe and the genocide of the Holocaust. The book did stir controversy. Robert M. Seltzer, reviewing it in the New Leader, felt it was "bizarre—sloppy, flippant and strangely sad." Lawrence Grossman, writing in First Things, called Cantor's book "perverse," and Hillel Halkin, reviewing The Sacred Chain in Commentary, felt that it is a "volume marked by error, arrogance, and a degree of disdain for his subject that makes his choosing of it seem a puzzle." But not all critics found this work faulty. Writing in Booklist, George Cohen thought it was a "penetrating history of Jewish experiences and achievements throughout the ages—one of the most comprehensive and insightful works to be published in its field."

From Jewish history, Cantor turned his attention to the modern United States in The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times, a revision of his earlier Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction. Here Cantor focuses on topics ranging from the novel to left-wing criticism, in an "opinionated survey peppered with startling insights and bold judgments," as a critic for Publishers Weekly noted. Cantor covers notable trends, events, movements, institutions, and art forms that blossomed during the twentieth century. Writing in Booklist, Gilbert dubbed the book a "marvelous essay on modernism and postmodernism," and a "masterfully erudite work, written with intimate conviviality." Adding to the praise, Hal Goodman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called The American Century "opinionated, idiosyncratic and thoroughly entertaining."

Cantor does much the same for the legal profession with his Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundation of the American Legal System, an "astute work [which] deflates the legal profession's most hysterical critics while illuminating the public's understanding of the origins of American law," according to Booklist's Ted Leventhal.

Cantor turns his attention back to the Middle Ages with In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made. "Cantor produces a popular account of one of the greatest disasters to befall the people of Europe," wrote a contributor for Publishers Weekly. Cantor chronicles the advent of the plague with a biomedical survey, speculation as to its origins, and a record of the devastation it caused, including a mortality rate of forty percent of the population. The book "will be welcomed by anyone who wants a good introduction to the topic," according to the Publishers Weekly reviewer. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, however, found Cantor's study "flawed by the author's gross generalizations, reductive reasoning and efforts to force-feed the reader with his own dubious opinions." Other reviewers found more to like in the volume. As Booklist's Taylor stated, "Cantor's erudite excursion proves most engrossing."

Though he retired from teaching in 1999, Cantor continued to write and published several notable works up until his death in 2004. In Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World, Cantor does for the ancient world what he did for the medieval world in his previous books. He concentrates on societies of the Near and Middle East, and the Jews in particular, theorizing about when and why they migrated from Egypt to parts East. The roots of Christianity are also explained, as are the histories of Greece and Rome. He attributes the latter's decline to plagues and reliance on slave labor over technological innovation. The scope of the book prompted a critic for Kirkus Reviews to claim it contains "a lifetime's worth of crib notes for late-blooming history buffs," while a writer for Publishers Weekly complimented Cantor's "eloquence and lucid insights," calling the book a "majestic introductory survey."

Two of Cantor's final works were biographies. In The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era, Cantor delves into the life of John of Gaunt, who became the Duke of Lancaster through his first marriage and strengthened other royal ties in his subsequent two marriages. He was a hero of late-fourteenth century Europe who fought in the Hundred Years' War and was a patron of Chaucer. Gaunt, as Cantor defines him, was the nexus of many important historical narratives that can all be explored through the events of his life. Writing in Booklist, Brendan Driscoll called the book "an engrossing portrait of a complicated figure."

Cantor's last book, Alexander the Great: Journey to the End of the Earth, which was completed by coauthor Dee Ranieri, covers the life of one of history's most famous individuals, the Macedonian conqueror whose short life was filled with military brilliance that led to the expansion of the Greek empire. Biographies of Alexander abound, so Cantor attempts to distinguish his by means of examining the hero's personality and private life, including his early years and especially his relationship with Hephaestion, his male lover. Clay Williams, writing in Library Journal, objected to Cantor's "Freudian rationalization" of the leader's relationship with his parents, but Hooper, writing in Booklist, praised the book's "incomparable mix of insight and cogency."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Cantor, Norman F., The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1994.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 1, 1993, Brad Hooper, review of The Civilization of the Middle Ages, p. 30; March 1, 1994, Gilbert Taylor, review of Medieval Lives: Eight Charismatic Men and Women of the Middle Ages, p. 1177; November 15, 1994, George Cohen, review of The Sacred Chain, p. 575; March 15, 1995, review of Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists, p. 1343; January 1, 1997, George Cohen, review of The Jewish Experience, p. 813; March 1, 1997, Gilbert Taylor, review of The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times, pp. 1107-1108; September 15, 1997, Ted Leventhal, review of Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System, p. 184; October 15, 1999, review of The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, p. 474; March 1, 2001, Gilbert Taylor, review of In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made, p. 1216; September 1, 2003, Gilbert Taylor, review of Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World, p. 48; June 1, 2004, Brendan Driscoll, review of The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era, p. 1692; September 1, 2005, Brad Hooper, review of Alexander the Great: Journey to the End of the Earth, p. 46.

Commentary, February, 1995, Hillel Halkin, review of The Sacred Chain, pp. 66-68.

Commonweal, June 3, 1994, Carl L. Bankston III, review of Medieval Lives, pp. 22-23.

Historian, autumn, 1992, W.M. Ormrod, review of Inventing the Middle Ages, pp. 112-113; winter, 2002, Jeffrey L. Forgeng, review of In the Wake of the Plague, p. 493.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2003; September 19, 2003, review of Antiquity, p. 890; April 15, 2004, review of The Last Knight, p. 371; October 1, 2005, review of Alexander the Great, p. 1059.

Library Journal, March 1, 1994, Bennet D. Hill, review of Medieval Lives, p. 100; November 15, 1994, Robert A. Silver, review of The Sacred Chain, p. 76; March 1, 1995, review of The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Parts 1 and 2, pp. 118-119; April 15, 2001, Robert J. Andrews, review of In the Wake of the Plague, p. 114; December 1, 2005, Clay Williams, review of Alexander the Great, p. 140.

New Leader, January 30, 1995, Robert M. Seltzer, review of The Sacred Chain, pp. 18-19.

New York Times, April 3, 2001, Michiko Kakutani, "The Pestilence That Left Not Just Death behind It," p. B8.

New York Times Book Review, October 23, 1988, Robin Lippincott, review of Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction, p. 39; July 24, 1994, David Walton, review of Medieval Lives, p. 18; February 5, 1995, Mark Silk, review of The Sacred Chain, p. 21; March 11, 1997, Hal Goodman, review of The American Century, p. 21.

Pacific Affairs, summer, 2001, David C. Wright, review of The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, p. 249.

Publishers Weekly, November 15, 1991, review of Inventing the Middle Ages, p. 56; February 14, 1994, review of Medieval Lives, p. 76; October 10, 1994, review of The Sacred Chain, p. 55; January 27, 1997, review of The American Century, p. 84; March 19, 2001, review of In the Wake of the Plague, p. 84; June 30, 2003, review of Antiquity, p. 66; April 12, 2004, review of The Last Knight, p. 45.

Times Literary Supplement, January 31, 1992, Michael Prestwich, review of Inventing the Middle Ages, pp. 5-6; June 12, 1998, Gary L. McDowell, review of Imagining the Law, p. 31.

ONLINE

First Things, http://www.firstthings.com/ (April, 1995), Lawrence Grossman, "A Judaism in His Image."

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, September 24, 2004, section 3, p. 9.

Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2004, p. B9.

New York Times, September 21, 2004, p. A29.

Times (London, England), September 27, 2004, p. 56.