Norman F. Cantor

Norman Frank Cantor (November 19, 1929 – September 18, 2004) was a Canadian-American historian who specialized in the medieval period. Known for his accessible writing and engaging narrative style, Cantor's books were among the most widely read treatments of medieval history in English. He estimated that his textbook The Civilization of the Middle Ages, first published in 1963, had a million copies in circulation.

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, to a Jewish family, Cantor received a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Manitoba in 1951. He moved to the United States to obtain an M.A. degree (1953) from Princeton University, then spent a year as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. He returned to Princeton and received his Ph.D. in 1957 under the direction of eminent medievalist Joseph R. Strayer. He also began his teaching career at Princeton.

After teaching at Princeton, Cantor became a professor at Columbia University from 1960 to 1966. He was a Leff professor at Brandeis University until 1970 and then was at Binghamton University until 1976 when he took a position at the University of Illinois at Chicago for two years. He then went on to New York University (NYU), where he served as Dean of NYU's College of Arts & Sciences, as well as a professor of history, sociology, and comparative literature. 

After a brief stint as Fulbright Professor at the Tel Aviv University History Department (1987–88), he returned to NYU, where he taught as a professor emeritus until his retirement in 1999. At that time, he devoted himself to working as a full-time writer. Although his early work focused on English religious and intellectual history, Cantor's later scholarly interests were diverse. He found more success writing for a popular audience than he did engaging in more narrowly focused original research. 

He did publish one monograph study, based on his graduate thesis, Church, kingship, and lay investiture in England, 1089-1135, which appeared in 1958 and remains an important contribution to the topic of church-state relations in medieval England. Throughout his career, however, Cantor preferred to write on the broad contours of Western history and the history of academic medieval studies in Europe and North America, particularly the lives and careers of eminent medievalists. 

His books generally received mixed reviews in academic journals. Still, they were often popular bestsellers, buoyed by Cantor's fluid, often colloquial, writing style and his lively critiques of persons and ideas both past and present.

Cantor was intellectually conservative and expressed deep skepticism about what he saw as methodological fads, particularly Marxism and postmodernism. Still, he also argued for greater inclusion of women and minorities in traditional historical narratives. In his books Inventing the Middle Ages (1991) and Inventing Norman Cantor (2002), he reflected on his strained relationship with other historians and academia in general.

Upon retirement in 1999, Cantor moved to Miami, Florida, where he continued to work on several books until his death, including the New York Times bestseller In the Wake of the Plague (2001). He was also the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (1999). He died of heart failure in Miami at the age of 74.