Robert Grosseteste and His Intellectual Milieu: New Editions and Studies ed. by John Flood, James R. Ginther, and Joseph W. Goering (review)

This volume is based on a conference that took place in 2003 at Bishop Grosseteste College (now University) in Lincoln, England, although a few contributions were commissioned later. The chapters are arranged in four parts.

Part One, which is devoted to “Grosseteste as Theologian and Philosopher,” opens with a study on free will in Robert Grosseteste’s De libero arbitrio, a topic that Neil Lewis approaches with the usual precision of the analytic philosopher. Mette Lebech and the late James McEvoy examine the question of human dignity through the lens of the relevant entry in Grosseteste’s Tabula (an index of sources that the bishop compiled under a large number of subject headings) and of a series of passages in which the dignity of the human condition is thematic. McEvoy also writes on Grosseteste’s conception of the spiritual life, while Michael Robson focuses on the two homilies that he delivered to the Franciscans on the topic of evangelical poverty. Joseph Goering’s contribution treats the state of research regarding Grosseteste’s Dicta, a large miscellany of 147 chapters that Grosseteste assembled from notes taken during his years in the schools, with the aim to create an “unsystematic theology” (74) ideal for pastoral uses.

Part Two, on “Grosseteste’s Intellectual Context,” consists of three chapters. Edgar Laird makes a case for Ptolemy’s influence on Grosseteste’s understanding of mathematics. Grosseteste had access to Ptolemaic ideas through two Arabic intermediaries, namely, treatises by Thābit bin Qurra and al-Farghānī that were translated into Latin in the twelfth century. R. James Long examines how Richard Fishacre’s, Richard Rufus’s, and Robert Kilwardby’s respective treatments of the creation of Eve show the imprint of Grossetestian ideas—although Grosseteste himself never addressed this precise topic. Cecelia Panti offers a new chronology of Grosseteste’s scientific writings, amending those previously produced by Richard C. Dales, Richard Southern, and McEvoy. She sides with Southern in attributing the Quaestio de fluxu et refluxu maris to Adam of Exeter.

In Part Three, the reader finds four editions and translations. First, Panti furnishes a long-awaited critical edition of what is perhaps Grosseteste’s best-known treatise, the De luce. Panti’s work underlines the importance of critical editions as the basis of serious scholarly study. For the old standard edition, which Ludwig Baur prepared over a hundred years ago, in 1912, contained a reference to Aristotle’s De caelo et mundo, which led subsequent scholarship to believe that this Aristotelian work functioned as a fundamental inspiration for Grosseteste’s cosmogony. In Panti’s edition, this reference has disappeared, as it is attested only by one, late fifteenth-century manuscript. Panti’s new edition is followed by a fresh English translation of the De luce, from the pen of Lewis. Meridel Holland both edits and translates Robert Grosseteste’s Latin version of St. John Damascene’s Dialogue of the Christian and the Saracen, a collection of suggested questions and answers compiled with a view to the Muslim’s conversion. Indeed, the text ends on a triumphalist note: “The Saracen withdrew, full of admiration and at a loss, confronting him with nothing else” (293). Holland’s edition juxtaposes Grosseteste’s Latin rendering line by line with the Greek original of the Dialogue—a method suggested by Grosseteste’s extremely literal translation, which remains faithful to the original he had available even where “manifestly corrupt Greek cannot by any stretch of the imagination have made sense to him” (257). Michael Dunne’s edition and translation of Sermon 86, on “The Ten Commandments of the Lord,” rounds off the third part of the volume.

The fourth and final part, “Grosseteste’s Afterlives,” consists of a single lengthy study co-authored by John Flood and, again, McEvoy. Contesting Southern’s claim...