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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.
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Previews available in: English
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Medieval lives: eight charismatic men and women of the Middle Ages
1995, HarperPerennial
in English
- 1st HarperPerennial ed.
0060925795 9780060925796
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Medieval lives: eight charismatic men and women of the Middle Ages
1994, HarperCollins Publishers
in English
- 1st ed.
0060169893 9780060169893
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Book Details
First Sentence
""The old Jewish whore is coming down the road with the bishop of Caesarea and the rest of her entourage " said Spero, the innkeeper, to Petra, the head of his assembled staff of six people."
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- Created April 29, 2008
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August 4, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 24, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Fixed duplicate goodreads IDs. |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
April 14, 2010 | Edited by Open Library Bot | Linked existing covers to the edition. |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |