Norman Cantor, one of the most controversial and celebrated American medievalists of the past half century has died at age 74. His Civilization of the Middle Ages was a classic from the moment it appeared forty years ago, and remains in print to this day (in a revised edition). He was reviled by many for his 1991 expose of the lives of other great medievalists, Inventing the Middle Ages. In particular, his treatment of Ernst Kantorowicz (the dean of medieval political theory) scandalized many in the field. Cantor suggested that Kantorowicz was an"impeccable Nazi", something for which he never provided evidence.

For my first three years of graduate school at UCLA, my primary mentor was the late Robert Benson, who had been a friend and student of Kantorowicz. Had he lived, he would have been my dissertation chair. It was Robert Benson who steered me towards my doctoral work on medieval bishops (something I have never blogged about, but oddly still near and dear to my heart). Benson's The Bishop Elect (alas, now out of print) was influenced by Kantorowicz's magisterial The King's Two Bodies, published in 1956 and still very much in print. Those two books were the most important works I read in my early graduate school career. Benson and Cantor were of similar age, and had known each other well. My mentor (who died in 1995) was heartbroken and infuriated by Cantor's betrayal of his master and the unproven insinuations of Nazism and anti-Semitism. (Robert Benson was Jewish, of course, as was Cantor). I remember that when Cantor's book came out in 1991, Profesor Benson was apoplectic. A letter that Benson wrote to the New York Review of Books condemning Cantor for his cruel lies is found here.

If you've ever been a grad student and studied with someone you admired and revered and lionized, you know how easy it is to take on their own prejudices! Though the roots of the Cantor-Benson-Kantorowicz clash were in the 1940s and 50s, I found myself taking on my adviser's sense of outrage and betrayal. I actually refused to read Cantor after that, and even (I do confess it), told one of my former students not to take a course from Cantor at NYU (where he taught until 1999). My student wisely ignored my advice, and was actually enrolled in the last undergraduate course he taught. She reported him to have been a lovely man, which may well have been true.

When I read Cantor's obit this morning, it brought back so many memories of my early grad school days at UCLA. In our little ivory tower world, we worked on paleography and medieval Latin, and spoke of Gratian's Decretum the way others speak of the Harry Potter books. We were all young, all eager to prove ourselves to these men who were our advisers and our mentors, who dispensed wisdom and TA-ships and their own prejudices. The love of a student for his first grad school mentor is a strange and passionate thing. I've never forgotten it. And even now, as I type this, in the back of my mind I am worried about what Robert Louis Benson, dead these nine years, would say as he read my little post about Cantor's passing.

Among other things, he would say that previous sentence ought not to have been begun with an"and".