Norman Cantor

Norman Frank Cantor (November 19, 1929 – September 18, 2004)) was a Canadian-American historian who specialized in the medieval period.

Quotes

• In 1302 Dante left Florence in exile, accused of graft, embezzlement, opposition to the pope, and disturbance of the peace of Florence.
  Dante's two greatest works, De Monarchia and the Divine Comedy, were both written during his exile. The shock of expulsion from his native city and his bitterness and disappointment forced Dante to reconsider his views on the individual and society, and these two works exhibit a maturity and profundity that is lacking in his early lyric poetry.
  • Renaissance Thought: Dante & Machiavelli. Volume 3 of Monuments of Western thought. Blaisdell Publishing Company. 1969. p. 8.  (227 pages; 1st part of quote last part of quote)

• Despite its emperors and popes and kings, tenth-century Europe had a patrimonial, nucleated society based on the domination by great aristocratic families over everything (even the church) within their own territorial domains. Bastard sons and younger brothers of the local lords became bishops or abbots of local churches and monasteries. Religion, as well as government and economy and law, was dominated by the great families. Everything belonged to the lords, who became more greedy and aggressive—particularly on their own estates—as the years went by.
  • Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. Books on Demand. 2023. p. 22. ISBN 9780718896690.  (480 pages; 1st edition 1992)

• The assize actions in property disputes moved slowly if that was the wish, as it often was, of the defendant. He was allowed three formal (always accepted) essoins, excuses why he could not appear before his case was declared forfeit.
  • Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System. HarperCollins Publishers. 1997. p. 56. ISBN 9780060171940.  (416 pages)

• Whatever the plague was—or continues to be—it still remains with us in its original form. Since the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s bubonic plague is very rare in the U.S.A., although there are still substantial outbreaks in eastern Asia, especially India. But in the 1980s there were three documented cases in the hill country of eastern California. One woman came down with the bubonic plague after she ran over a squirrel with a power mower. It is likely that the disease entered California at some port on a rodent traveling on a ship from eastern Asia.
  • In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (illustrated pbk ed.). Simon & Schuster. 2015. p. 21. ISBN 9781476797748.  (256 pages; 2001 1st edition)

• Is historical writing to be addressed to a small group of academics or is it to be communicated to the educated world at large? I stand with the latter proposition, that history books are communicable to and accessible by the educated public at large. The ultimate task and obligation of a historian is to bring this kind of illumination to as wide an audience as possible.
  • Cantor, Norman (2002), Inventing Norman Cantor: Confessions of a Medievalist, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Occasional Publications 1, Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, p. 223, ISBN 0-86698-293-0