Medieval Lives

In his new book Norman F. Cantor, the brilliant author of Inventing the Middle Ages and The Civilization of the Middle Ages, profiles eight men and women who are both representative figures of the Middle Ages and led extraordinary lives. Among them are Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, often called the founder of the Middle Ages and author of the first modern autobiography; Cardinal Humbert of Lorraine, the chief political theorist of the medieval papacy; and Robert Grosseteste, the founder of experimental science and the Franciscan opponent of Thomas Aquinas. Of the women Cantor profiles, Helena Augusta, the mother of fourth-century Roman emperor Constantine, played a significant role in the formation of medieval religious culture. Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess who developed a form of personal visionary mysticism and feminist theory. The third of Cantor's principal women subjects, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was the most famous of medieval queens and had an enormous influence both on politics and society and the arts and literature of her time. Norman F. Cantor's approach to these profiles is almost novelistic: he has invented conversations, based closely on a century of medieval scholarship and on the original sources, which thrust the reader immediately into the lives of his subjects, their colleagues, and friends, and give an immediacy to medieval life rarely encountered in conventional biography. Cantor makes not only comprehensible but exciting to the reader the crises and crosscurrents of medieval cultural history. In a manner rarely achieved, he gets the reader inside the psyche of medieval women and men and makes us fully empathize with their aspirations, triumphs, anxieties, and disappointments.