LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 148, 18 March 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

LIFE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

“Medieval Panorama,” by G. G. Coulton (Cambridge: University Press),

Dr. Coulton, acknowledged authority on the Middle Ages,; in this book provides a vivid description of life in England during the period between the Norman Conquest and the Reformation. It is a large book and it deals with a complex subject, yet Dr. Coulton succeeds in imposing order upon the vast confusion of the information bequeathed to the present age and presents a vivid exposition of the medieval social drama.

“The book,” he writes in a preface, “makes no pretence either to exhaustiveness or to finality. It tries to bring some sort ot order into a mass of details, each interesting in itself, but resting necessarily, in most cases, upon other men’s researches and judgments. It looks forward to correction and amplification by others; but it hopes to supply, for the time being, the sort of scaffolding which the author would have been very glad to find before him fifty years ago.” It is the sort of scaffolding which the general reader will delight to use as support for his pryings into the past, into a remarkable world of violent contrasts and one which, for all its distance, is of great significance to the modern era.