Editing Robert Grosseteste ed. by Evelyn A. Mackie, Joseph Goering (review)

REVIEWS 215 Editing Robert Grosseteste, ed. Evelyn A. Mackie and Joseph Goering (Toronto : University of Toronto Press 2003) xv + 208 pp. This collection of articles, many by active editors of Grosseteste’s work, originated in papers given at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems at the University of Toronto in 2000, and both captures and advances the current work on Robert Grosseteste. As each of the essays explores in different ways, the theoretical and the practical problems of editing Grosseteste’s copious body of work are interesting in their own right, and also because they directly relate to fundamental issues of concern to scholars of the medieval period, including authorial identity, textual transmission and dialogue, as well as concepts crucial to medieval thinkers themselves, such as translation, exegesis, and doctrinal dissonance and orthodoxy in the Christian world and its Greek philosophical antecedents. James McEvoy begins this volume with “Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy.” This valuable essay introduces us to the person who stands behind the book, usefully dividing the texts associated with Grosseteste into the following categories: The Scientist and Metaphysician, The Biblical Exegete, The Greek Scholar, The Lector and Bishop, The Bishop at Prayer, and Memorials and Legacy. McEvoy writes with erudition and sympathetic portraiture, and his categories will be helpful both for the neophyte in Grossetestian studies as well as providing any reader with some of the fundamental distinctions which serve to structure the essays that follow. Even as he establishes these rubrics, McEvoy notes their interpermeation, observing, for example, some of the ways in which biblical exegesis and science are inseparable in Grosseteste’s praxis. In “The Super Psalterium in Context,” James R. Ginther provides a fascinating and admirably clear exploration of the use of theology as a category to understand some of Grosseteste’s works. Ginther’s goal is to frame his forthcoming edition of the Super Psalterium within the various modes of Grosseteste’s theological writing, and he accomplishes some very interesting and provocative insights in the process of doing so. This may prove to be one of the most interesting chapters for the general reader, as Ginther locates the concepts of intertextuality and mouvance as useful tools in both understanding and representing Grosseteste’s writings. These concepts elegantly slice through what would otherwise be a formidable problem: that a modern editor might seek to locate and represent an ideal, autonymously authored text when such a concept would have made no sense to Grosseteste himself. Evelyn Mackie’s article on the text and reception of Le Chateau d’amour provides fascinating reading as it explores the text with something akin to Ginther ’s understanding of mouvance. Mackie unites a finely-tuned collation-based research with some careful philological work in order to understand the nature and motivation of scribal intervention in the reproduction of this text. Mackie nicely creates a theoretical bridge between her own edition of the poem, in progress, and the efforts of scribes to craft the original text(s) for different readers (of varying capability, interest and gender) in the medieval period. In her essay on Grosseteste’s encounter with the body of work associated with Pseudo-Dionysius, Candice Taylor Quinn asks us to reevaluate not only Grosseteste’s Augustinian orthodoxy, but consequently the orthodoxy of his peers, particularly in Paris. From a highly local level (in the careful mediation REVIEWS 216 and occasional rejection of the Latin equivalencies for Greek phrases) to a teleological one (in his carefully defined goal of access to mens auctoris), Grosseteste’s tendency to seek unity in apparently discordant theologies (alluded to in the introductory chapter by McEvoy) is here evident in his translation , and enables him to use ideas like the Pseudo-Dionysian hierarchy both to explain and to expand Augustinian orthodoxy; Quinn negotiates these complex ideas with admirable acuity. Two issues that appear recurrently throughout the collection, the chronology of Grosseteste’s works and the definition of a “text,” are the both central foci of Neil Lewis’s essay on the Notes on the Physics. Lewis makes a strong case for a strategy for editing the Notes by using two manuscripts to provide the structure of the text, and then...