Charles Homer Haskins was one of a small group of American historians who initiated the study of medieval history at the professional level in the United States and one of the first American scholars of medieval history to win the high praise of nearly all his European contemporaries. The distinguished German classicist Theodor Mommsen, grandson of the great historian, judged that Haskins "represents the rare case of a man who combined the qualities of the efficient organizer, the original scholar, and the great teacher." The eminent French medievalist F. Jonan des Longrais said "without exaggeration" that Charles Homer Haskins was "truly the soul of the renascence of mediaeval studies in the United States." Perhaps the greatest tribute to Haskins's "refined and balanced scholarship," his attractive writing--"neither light nor expansive"--and his "striking ideas, the far-reaching speculations which we expect in the great historian," came from Sir Frederick...