Coulton, G G
Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1858-1947) UK medieval historian and author, active from the 1890s, father of Sarah Campion. The unrelenting secular focus to which he exposed his subject matter, in books like Life in the Middle Ages (1910), generated a decades-long mutual detestation between him and figures like Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton, whose sentimentalized vision of England as essentially medieval and innately Catholic he treated as poisonous; Romanism and Truth (1930-1931 2vols) is particularly savage. This animus can be seen to govern the highly secular Satire of the medieval priesthood found in his only novel, Friar's Lantern (1906), a Timeslip tale which recounts the shocked response of a contemporary visitor to fifteenth-century England. He is returned to the nineteenth century through the experience of being burned at the stake. [JC]
George Gordon Coulton
born King's Lynn, Norfolk: 15 October 1858
died Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: 4 March 1947
works (highly selected)
- Friar's Lantern (London: James Clarke and Company, 1906) [hb/uncredited]
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