This short and entertaining account of life in fourteenth century England and France uses the life of John of Gaunt to illustrate its themes. Cantor is opinionated. He likes to make analogies with today’s social institutions, popular literature, and movies. This makes the book feel “unscholarly”, but it comes closer to the actual conversations that historians are likely to hold while discussing John of Gaunt in a pub. It”s the sort of book that should be read by a few friends one evening, then discussed over beer the next.
There are two attitudes that one can hold about a distant time. One is that “the past is a foreign country” — that we can’t really put ourselves in the shoes of fourteenth century people, because their experience was fundamentally alien to our own. The other is that the past is comprehensible to us psychologically, if our interpretations are based on common sense, because human nature and character remain constants. Things in our own experience will present themselves as clarifying parallels. Cantor is inclined to this last attitude, and so am I. I was not very surprised to learn that Cantor is not the usual Oxford don, but the son of a Manitoba rancher. An earlier book of his, which I greatly enjoyed, examined the personal experiences and attitudes of several twentieth century historians who interpreted the Middle Ages (Inventing the Middle Ages, 1992).
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