Last year on February 25, Paul Cantor, an outstanding scholar of Renaissance and Romantic literature as well as contemporary culture, passed away. He was seventy-six. Cantor was not just an eminent scholar of the European Renaissance but a Renaissance man himself in the sphere of arts and letters. Whether the subject was classical music or the history of painting or belles-lettres or the worlds of popular entertainment and sports, his knowledge was vast and his insights were subtle and nuanced. (For years he hosted a radio show in classical music; later he did most of the programming selections for the Tuesday Evening Concert Series at the University of Virginia.)
The memorial tributes of the past year focused, and justly so, on Cantor’s remarkable achievements as a literary scholar and public intellectual. I was privileged to know him not only as a scholar but also as a teacher, mentor, and friend. Those dimensions of his life—in many respects even more noteworthy than his accomplished career as a scholar-critic—warrant equal attention.
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