Henry Osborn Taylor

Henry Osborn Taylor (1856–1941) was an American historian of ideas. Born in New York and trained as a lawyer at Columbia, he abandoned practice to write a connected history of the Western mind, which appeared as Ancient Ideals (1896), The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (1901), The Mediaeval Mind (1911), his best-known work, and Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century (1920). Working independently of any university, he was elected president of the American Historical Association in 1927. His method was to let medieval writers speak through long quotation, and his books remain readable introductions to the emotional and intellectual life of the Middle Ages.