I recently enjoyed this analytic philosopher’s (I make this assumption given his over-simplistic reference to postmodern historians as “anti-representationalists” and his outdated analytic philosophy of history article) short review of Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages (Also reprinted here).
Blogenspiel has already responded to it but was more than anything venting anger at Cantor. This means failing to notice the fact that Paul Newall’s review is more than anything an indirect shot at the “postmodern” historians who he thinks have failed to consider the sociological dimension. In disgust Blogenspiel asks, “Do any working historians actually take his thesis that seriously?” I am no medievalist so I’m reluctant to make claims about that field in particular, but we might answer that by noting that the book was reviewed by the American Historical Review (Dec. 1992 Vol. 97, No. 5, p. 1500) which took it to task on some of the particulars but concluded, “the originality of this inquiry, and the breadth of learning and imagination it displays, make it a very important study.” As Blogenspiel hints though, Cantor’s study of 20th century medieval history is a story is only carried through 1965. Richard W. Praff’s review of it in the journal of medieval history, Speculum (Jan. 1993 Vol. 68, No. 1), where Cantor’s book hits much closer to home, gives a much harsher view but takes it very seriously, concluding that “The widespread circulation of this mean-spirited and tendentious work is a grievous blow to medieval studies.”
The response to it doesn’t take me by surprise. Historians, especially those of a more traditional positivist flavor, dislike this sort of book. It very well may have have been shoddy on the empirical side. However, I was amused that Paul Newall thinks the 1991 book “represented a new direction in historiography.” It may have dealt a “grievous blow to medieval studies” but this isn’t a new direction in historiography. The book is a straight-up discourse history. This has not been a “new direction” for history since at least Foucault in the 1970s with perhaps the most inflammatory example with historiographical impact being Said’s Orientalism of 1978. If you think the trend towards discourse history by the structuralist and post-structuralist “anti-representationalists” is not worthy of discussion you can point to other “invention” or “imagining” works which followed in the 1980s such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition and Benedict Anderson’s famous Imagined Communities, both from 1983.
I really like your writings!