Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives on His Thought and Scholarship

In Grosseteste we have on our hands a figure, not only of great complexity in himself, but of even greater complexity in the kind of evidence which we are required to use. It is worth remembering that, despite all efforts of the last half century, quite half of his works are still unpublished. When we turn to Grosseteste, we find a situation which is as different from this as it could well be. He presents a quite unique combination of problems. The range of subjects he studied, the way in which he studied them, and the order in which he studied them, seem to be - to a much greater extent than any of the great scholastic thinkers - to be an expression, not of any normal programme of university studies, but of his personality and of the obscure and varied background and circumstances of his life. His thoughts on the subjects which he chose to elaborate are markedly his own. In a word uniqueness of circumstances and personality.