Norman F. Cantor was Emeritus Professor of History, Sociology, and Comparative Literature at New York University. His academic honors included appointments as a Rhodes Scholar, Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow at Princeton University, and Fulbright Professor at Tel Aviv University. Previous books include the bestselling "In the Wake of the Plague, Inventing the Middle Ages" (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), and "The Civilization of the Middle Ages, " the most widely read narrative of the Middle Ages in the English language. He died in 2004 at his home in Miami. He was 74 and a former resident of Greenwich Village.