Editing Robert Grosseteste: Papers Given at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 3-4 November 2000 (review)

The great medieval scholar and bishop Robert Grosseteste remains an enigmatic giant on the intellectual horizon. This is partly because, in R.W. Southern's words, quoted in Joseph Goering's introduction to this volume, '[no] other individual embraced so powerfully, or with such independent power, the whole range of contemporary learning, passing successively from music and medicine, to astronomy and cosmology, to the study of ... Aristotle, to the Latin and Greek Fathers, and beyond them to translating and commenting on the Hierarchies of pseudo-Dionysius'; it is partly, too, because this individuality and non-conformity means that large parts of Grosseteste's long career are even more mysterious to us than the careers of other medieval thinkers.

Editing Grosseteste, then, requires knowledge of and skills in a very broad range of expertise, and it is not surprising that few modern scholars have attempted an overview of his life and works. The dating of his works is problematical. Moreover, Grosseteste's own working methods make editing his work unusually difficult. since he seems to have reworked his subjects, or produced successive versions of his texts over long periods of time, and rarely to have considered something to be in a finished and 'published' form. Much of his work seems (as Cecilia Panti's essay also implies) to have been written for himself, rather than for others.

Mackie and Goering have here assembled a small group of scholars, each addressing a facet of the Grosseteste problem. The list comprises James McEvoy on the man and his legacy; James R. Ginther on Super Psalterium; Mackie on Le Château d'Amour; Candice Taylor Quinn on the Corpus Dionysiacum; Neil Lewison the Notes on the Physics; Panti on early cosmology; and Jennifer Moreton on editing texts which turn out not to be by Grosseteste.

The balance of these essays is very good indeed. Mackie shows how subsequent copyists of Grosseteste's text adapted it for specific audiences. Her conclusions are balanced and are based on her intimate knowledge of the MSS and textual tradition.

Similarly, Quinn addresses the vexed issue of Grosseteste's knowledge of Greek, giving a neat short overview of pseudo-Dionysius in the Middle Ages. She too then draws on her close readings of the MSS to make general points. She notes the difficulties of reading Grosseteste which seem to be inherent in his often long-winded and parenthetical style. It is refreshing to see a Grosseteste scholar admit that his intelligent and original ideas are not matched by clarity of expression and structure. And Quinn makes another undoubtedly correct point: that for Grosseteste, 'the sole purpose and end of studying doctrine was evangelical. For him, symbolic theology was not at odds, nor could it be, with the analytic ... approach ... for comprehending the sensible world.'

Lewis, faced with the particularly difficult Notes on the Physics, both makes good points about the varieties of version available in Grosseteste's own time (showing along the way how his medieval editors struggled with his texts), and by his careful textual work redates these texts to the 1220s from the 1230s, hoping thereby to clarify our knowledge of Grosseteste's earlier career.

Panti's close work on three cosmological texts is also supportive of the likelihood raised elsewhere by Goering (whose intelligent readings of Grosseteste are seconded in other essays here as well) that Grosseteste spent a substantial part of 1220-30 in Paris, if not formally studying theology in the Schools, then talking and listening to those who did.

Ginther raises the possibility of editing Grosseteste using the literary concept of mouvance - producing texts not in a single 'perfect' state as classical principles of editing would prefer, but as a series of versions, changing with time, perhaps, or with audience or with scribe, possible with computer hypertext in...