Early in his book, the distinguished medieval historian Robert Lerner, now emeritus at Northwestern University, describes what was for him a seminal moment in 1961 when he was a first-year graduate student in medieval history at Princeton. Lerner was standing at a faculty cocktail party with his advisor, Joseph Strayer, chair of the Princeton history department, and the well-known French historian R.R. Palmer, who had recently won the Bancroft Prize, when a guest walked across the room to join the conversation.
As he later learned, Lerner had just met the eminent medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz.