Robert E. Lerner

Ernst Kantorowicz was one of the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century, and one whose life more than merited a biography of his own: a bisexual dandy born into a wealthy Jewish family, a veteran of the First World War who began his academic career as part of a reactionary, homoerotic group of romantic nationalists, wrote a best-selling biography of the Emperor Frederick which became a cultural lodestone for Nazis during the 1930s, fled to the U.S. just before the show more outbreak of the Second World War, and became a professor at Berkeley where he hosted boozy, erudite dinners and was one of the lead activists to push back against the anti-Communist loyalty oaths of the 1950s.

Robert Lerner was well-placed to write this biography—himself a well-known medievalist, he draws on personal conversations and correspondence with many people who knew Kantorowicz personally. I find it hard to imagine this biography ever being surpassed. Yet despite the depth of Lerner's research, Kantorowicz himself remains an elusive subject, a bundle of contradictions (generous, witty, and determined to live life to the full, he was also a thorough-going misogynist and a snob) whose ideological shifts are difficult to track or categorise. Still, I finished the book rather thinking that that is how Kantorowicz himself would have wished it. show less

THE HERESEY OF THE FREE SPIRIT IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES

The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages has been widely recognized as the standard work on the subject in any language. Robert E. Lerner examines this fourteenth-century European heresy as it appeared in its own age. He concludes that the Free-Spirit movement was not a tightly organized sect of anarchistic deviants, but rather a spectrum of belief that emphasized voluntary poverty and quietist mysticism.