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

Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170–1253) was by any standard a remarkable figure among the great thinkers of the thirteenth century, not least because he was never part of the circle of masters associated with the University of Paris. This volume marks an important complement to existing scholarship on Grosseteste. Not the least significant contributions to this volume are three studies by the late James McEvoy, one co-authored with Mette Lebech on Grosseteste’s understanding of human dignity, another co-authored with John Flood on the way Grosseteste was used in the early modern period, and a third, an eloquent essay on Grosseteste as Spiritual Guide. This volume provides not only a range of essays on Grosseteste’s writings and intellectual context, but also critical editions and translations of some little known texts, notably his De luce (edited by Cecilia Panti and translated by Neil Lewis), his rendering of The Dialogue of the Christian and the Saracen by John of Damascus (by Meridel Holland), and his Sermon 86 on The Ten Commandments (by Michael W. Dunne).

In many ways, Grosseteste stands apart from his Parisian contemporaries by not being affected by the dominant directions of their thought. Thus Neil Lewis opens the volume with an essay on his philosophical understanding of free will as ‘flexibility towards opposites’. This approach differs significantly from the views of his peers that it was freedom from compulsion (William of Auxerre), the ability to do what one wills (Alexander of Hales), or a capacity to retain rectitude of the will (Philip the Chancellor). Grosseteste shares with them a common debt to Bernard of Clairvaux in their being a hierarchy of freedoms, with, at its base, freedom from necessity, then freedom of grace, and finally freedom of glory or pleasure, but emphasises that it must involve genuine choice between any opposites (not simply between good and evil). A similar emphasis on the dignity of human capacity comes out in the paper by Lebech and McEvoy on his thinking on human dignity, theorised in terms of the human person as made in the image of God, with a capacity for reciprocity and communication modelled on that of the Trinity. Next is Joe Goergin’s study of Grosseteste’s Dicta, a text that has only recently come to scholarly attention. These derive from 147 oral presentations given in the 1230s on a wide range of topics, moral, exegetical, and homiletic (usefully listed in an appendix). McEvoy’s essay on Grosseteste as a spiritual guide draws out how he was able to build on the monastic spirituality of St Bernard with its emphasis on experience, but to extend this to a non-monastic milieu. His spirituality was thus rooted in a Scriptural emphasis on the priority of love, without relying as much on the rhetoric of the cloister. The sermons that he preaches on evangelical poverty, studied by Michael Robson, illustrated how the Franciscan ethos enabled him to transform monastic values within a larger, uncloistered world.

A second section of the volume is devoted to Grosseteste’s intellectual context. He was fascinated by the flowering of new astronomical learning, particularly rich within England. Edgar Laird points out that this new learning was based not just on the writings of Aristotle, but on the Almagest of Ptolemy. A core element of Grosseteste’s understanding of the universe was its mathematic structure, a theme that Ptolemy developed much more than Aristotle, drawing on a Pythagorean perspective, but supplemented by observation of the heavens. This conviction in the mathematical basis of physical reality was a theme that Grosseteste made his own. More from a philosophical angle, James Long considers how Grosseteste’s conviction that a theologian had first to absorb natural sciences shaped the responses of Fishacre, Rufus, and...