Books: Coulton's Cabbage

In the British Who's Who George Gordon Coulton cites as his hobby "vegetating." By profession he is a distinguished Cambridge historian, and in the last 15 years the body of his scholarly works on medieval life has sprouted as quietly and as fast as the vegetable he emulates in spare time. Last month was published a great comprehensive cabbage of a book called Medieval Panorama (Macmillan $4), a hybrid of all his previous works. It is a wonderfully nourishing dish, but, like most well-boiled English cabbage, dull on the palate.

Dr. Coulton says that he writes, and other people read, history because it is fascinating to see how it repeats itself with a difference — how man's never-changing nature reacts to his ever-changing environment. Some of the evidence for his theory: the description of how a fascist Church thumbscrewed and burned its subjects without even a semblance of justice (there is no recorded case of not guilty under the Inquisition) for refusing to swear undivided allegiance ; how Edward I expelled the Jews from England in 1290, taking their houses, their money, some times (accidentally) their lives. For tile rest, Professor Coulton himself describes the book as a scaffolding by which young students may climb to chisel details on the monument of knowledge. The analogy is poor. No scaffolding was ever built so meticulously from such solid materials.