Editing Robert Grosseteste 9781442674271

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Editing Robert Grosseteste

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Editing Robert Grosseteste Papers given at the Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems University of Toronto, 3-4 November 2000 Edited by Evelyn A. Mackie and Joseph Goering

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2003 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8841-4

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National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Conference on Editorial Problems (36th : 2000 : University of Toronto) Editing Robert Grosseteste : papers given at the thirty-sixth annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 3-4 November 2000 / edited by Evelyn A. Mackie and Joseph Goering Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-8841-4 i. Grosseteste, Robert, 11757-1253 - Criticism, Textual - Congresses. 2. Manuscripts, Medieval - Editing Congresses. I. Mackie, Evelyn A. (Evelyn Anne) II. Goering, Joseph, 1947- . III. Title PNi62.c64 2000

189'.4

02003-903367-8

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Editing Robert Grosseteste JOSEPH GOERING xi 1 Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy JAMES McEVOY 3 2 The Super Psalterium in Context JAMES R. GINTHER 31 3 Scribal Intervention and the Question of Audience: Editing Le Chateau d 'amour EVELYN A. MACKIE 6l 4 Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum: Accessing Spiritual Realities through the Word CANDICE TAYLOR QUINN 79

5 Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics NEIL LEWIS 103 6 Robert Grosseteste's Early Cosmology CECILIA PANTT 135

7 On Not Editing Grosseteste JENNIFER MORETON 167

vi / Contents Select Bibliography 185 Index of Ancient and Medieval Names and Works 199 Index of Modern Names 203

Notes on Contributors

JAMES R. GINTHER is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology at St Louis University, St Louis, Missouri. JOSEPH GOERING is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. NEIL LEWIS is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. EVELYN A. MACKIE recently completed her PhD (2002) in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. JAMES MCEVOY is Dean and Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Republic of Ireland. JENNIFER MORETON teaches at the Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Republic of Ireland. CECILIA PANTI is assegnista di ricerca at the University of Siena, Siena, Italy, in the Dipartimento di Archeologia e Storia delle Arti. CANDICE TAYLOR QUINN is Associate Professor of History at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Massachusetts.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to take this opportunity to express our appreciation to those individuals whose assistance and advice made the conference 'Editing Robert Grosseteste' possible. The executive committee for the Conference on Editorial Problems provided direction and support: Fred Unwalla, Chair; Don Moggeridge, Treasurer; William Edwards; Gillian Fen wick; Ann M. Hutchison; Alexandra Johnston; Alexander Jones; and Kristen Pedersen. The congenial surroundings we enjoyed for our sessions would not have been possible without the assistance of Lynette Beron, University College; Gabriella Bravo, University of Toronto Library; and Richard Landon, Fisher Rare Book Library. Marilyn Colago and Irene Kao of the Department for the Study of Religion monitored a multitude of details and were on hand to offer assistance throughout the conference. Rick Mazza, University of Toronto Bookstore, and Bruce Peters, University of Toronto Press, organized book displays which were greatly appreciated. Tuija Ainonen, our conference administrator, kept things running like clockwork with the generous assistance of Joanna Carraway, Rick Graff, Magda Hayton, Sarah Powrie, and Edward Waple. Johanna Goering cheerfully gave up untold hours to produce the conference publicity, which has been framed and hung on more than one wall. We especially appreciate the time and effort extended by our session chairs: Jim Long, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT; Frank Mantello, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC; and Maura O'Carroll, SND, London, UK. Finally, we are grateful for the financial support received from the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies, the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Departments of Classics, English, French, Italian, and Philosophy, the Department for the Study of Religion, the School of Graduate Studies, Trinity College, University College, the University of Toronto Library, Fisher Rare Book Library, the

x / Acknowledgments University of Toronto Press, and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

JOSEPH GOERING

Introduction: Editing Robert Grosseteste

Among the great editorial projects of medieval texts in the past century, one of the most demanding, and most intriguing, has been the edition of the works of Robert Grosseteste (11253). The difficulty and the intrigue lie partly in the nature of the writer and the breadth of his interests and expertise. As Sir Richard Southern has said of Grosseteste: '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/ To edit his works is to come to terms with, as Southern puts it, 'one of the longest, most varied, and most powerful intellectual developments of any single individual in medieval history/1 A further challenge in editing Grosseteste's writings lies in the lack of certainty about the dating of his works and the chronology and setting of his various activities. We know something of the general outlines of Grosseteste's career. He was born, probably of humble parents in rural England, sometime around H75-2 By the age of twenty-five he had received a basic education in the schools, and had begun to pursue advanced studies, in England and on the continent, in the natural sciences, philosophy, and perhaps theology. By the age of fifty Grosseteste had become deeply involved in theological study and was producing original and influential works of both scholastic and pastoral theology, most of them in Latin, but some in French (Anglo-Norman). He was also engaged in an extremely ambitious project of translating into Latin the works of Greek Church fathers, philosophers, and commentators. In 1235 Grosseteste was elected bishop of Lincoln, an office that he filled conscientiously until his death in October of 1253.

xii / Joseph Goering This basic outline of his career has been reconstructed painstakingly from two types of sources: a very few historical documents that situate him in certain places at certain times, and from the more abundant, but ambivalent, evidence of his writings, most of which are open to differing interpretations of authenticity, date, and historical context. The editor of Grosseteste's works is necessarily engaged in a complex and reciprocal process of critical investigation. The more we know about Grosseteste's career, the more accurately we can date his works and interpret them in their proper context, and the more accurately we can date and situate the writings, the more we can know about his career. A third difficulty, replete with its own pleasures, is the untidy nature of the manuscript evidence of the writings. During his lifetime, Grosseteste produced countless works of great importance for historians of science, philosophy, theology, pastoral care, Latin and vernacular literatures, and many others. Until 1940 we had not even a hand list of these many writings, much less a guide to the one thousand and more medieval manuscripts in which they are to be found.3 These manuscripts are scattered in libraries and collections throughout Europe, and the very distribution of them may eventually tell us something about where the works were written, and where and by whom they were especially appreciated. A peculiarity of the manuscript evidence is that often the most complete and coherent copies of Grosseteste's works are far removed from him in time and place; the closer we come to the author's own day, the more disjointed and disordered is the manuscript evidence.4 It is the editor's difficult task to make sense of this amorphous mass of evidence, and to represent it usefully and critically. One of Grosseteste's preferred methods of composition seems to have been to jot down notes on pieces of parchment (cedulae) or in the margins of books, and allow his students to consult these. Over time, it seems, these were gathered together, by Grosseteste or others, into more or less finished works. Composing in this way may, indeed, have been more typical of medieval schoolmen than has been previously recognized, and the editors of Grosseteste's works are beginning to shed a good deal of light on the peculiarities of literary production in the nascent schools and universities. The papers collected in this volume are chosen to illustrate the extraordinary range of Grosseteste's writings, and the variety of skills, knowledge, and attention that they require of their editors. James McEvoy introduces these essays by putting a human face on the author whose works we are considering. Drawing on his own wide experience as an editor and a student of Grosseteste's writings, McEvoy

Introduction: Editing Robert Grosseteste / xiii sketches a portrait of the man who was able to produce such a diverse and profound body of scientific, philosophical, philological, and theological texts. His is a tribute, also, to the innumerable (and often nameless) copyists, scholars and editors who have preserved the thought and writings of Robert Grosseteste up to the present day, and to those who continue to make his legacy available to a wide readership, far removed from the world of the thirteenth century. James Ginther takes as his subject the editing of Grosseteste's theological writings. By 1229, Grosseteste had begun lecturing to the newly established Franciscan Friars in Oxford, and his literary production from this time until his death in 1253 was primarily pastoral and theological. Ginther introduces the whole range of these writings, and then tackles the editorial problems raised by the critical edition of Grosseteste's commentary on the Psalms. This text has long proved resistant to traditional editorial and interpretive methods. Ginther suggests ways in which contemporary ideas of intertexruality and mouvance can help both to understand the creation of the Super Psalterium and to argue for an appropriate way in which the editors might represent this work in print. Evelyn Mackie, the editor of Grosseteste's Anglo-Norman masterpiece Le chateau d'amour, a 1770-line poem outlining salvation history, surveys Grosseteste's vernacular writings, and then explores questions of scribal intervention and audience raised by her critical edition of the Chateau. All that we know about the original audience and purpose of this didactic poem is what can be gleaned from the manuscripts themselves. Her painstaking collation and study of the extant manuscripts allows her to shed new light on the presumed authorial original, and to illustrate the continuing life of the text as it passed from scribe to scribe and from reader to reader. She demonstrates that scribes acted as deliberate interpreters of the text that they were copying, and that they adapted it for the needs, interests, and abilities of their patrons. Candice Taylor Quinn introduces yet another facet of Grosseteste's intellectual activity, his translations from the Greek. During the last twenty-five or thirty years of his life Grosseteste learned Greek, sought out and collected manuscripts of Greek religious and philosophical texts, and translated them into Latin on a scale that has seldom been seen before or since. He translated the entire corpus of John of Damascus's writings, he made the first complete translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (used subsequently by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas), and his seem to have been the first Latin translations of the Letters of St Ignatius, and of the so-called Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. His greatest project, however, and perhaps the most difficult, was his

xiv / Joseph Goering translation of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius along with their Greek commentaries. Quinn explores the particular problems that Grosseteste encountered in translating the obscure and difficult Dionysian texts, and the problems that these translations raise for their modern editors. Neil Lewis discusses Grosseteste's Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle, probably the first Latin commentary on this seminal text which served as the basis of the Arts curriculum until the end of the Middle Ages. Lewis is able to show that Grosseteste's Scriptum super libros Physicorum is actually an edition of extensive notes that Grosseteste had written in preparation for a continuous commentary. He also demonstrates that the three extant manuscripts, all from the fourteenth century, preserve two different medieval editions of Grosseteste's notes. Lewis guides us through this tangled forest, indicating how the problems presented by the evidence will be solved in the modern critical edition, and discussing the evidence on which these solutions are based. Cecilia Panti presents the fruits of her research in editing three of Grosseteste's works on scientific cosmology, the De sphera, the De cometis, and the De motu supercelestium. Her thorough study of the manuscripts and textual traditions of the three works, and of other texts related to them, illustrates the necessity and the fruitf ulness of such research. It has allowed her to offer elegant solutions to some of the most vexing problems surrounding the historical development of Grosseteste's scientific thought and the authenticity of several works ascribed to him. Jennifer Moreton introduces the editorial problems surrounding another type of scientific writing that concerned Grosseteste and his contemporaries, that on the calendar and the reckoning of time. The intricacies of this literature and of the science that underlies it present many challenges and opportunities for the editor. Four works on the calendar have traditionally been ascribed to Grosseteste. Moreton's edition of a fifth text, the Computus ecclesiasticus, written by an unknown author, has allowed her to make critical judgments about the works ascribed to Grosseteste and to conclude that only one of them is certainly authentic. Her editorial efforts also permit her to draw larger conclusions about the contemporary and longer-term influence of Grosseteste's writings on scientific education and calendar reform. NOTES i

Richard W. Southern, 'Richard Dales and the Editing of Robert Grosseteste/ in Aspectus et Affectus: Essays and Editions in Grosseteste and Medi-

Introduction: Editing Robert Grosseteste / xv eval Intellectual Life in Honor of Richard C. Dales, ed. Gunar Freibergs (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 3-14, at 12. Southern concludes: 'When all his works have been critically edited, as one day they will be, Grosseteste will come into full view, with a degree of detail not yet available, and with a range of intellectual vision not yet fully explored, as one of the giants of medieval Europe' (13). 2 Two recent books provide lively and stimulating introductions to Grosseteste's life and works: Richard W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 3 In that year S. Harrison Thomson published his seminal and still indispensable catalogue The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). 4 See Southern, 'Richard Dales and the Editing of Robert Grosseteste/ 5. Southern adds: 'I do not think that any other major medieval figure left his work in such disarray or subject to so many hazards of destruction or deformation, and it is the first task of an editor to bring order out of an untidy mass of loose ends/

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Editing Robert Grosseteste

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JAMES McEVOY

i Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy Dedicated to the memory of Richard William Southern, 8 February 1912 - 6 February 2001

Would not each scholar who has some acquaintance with Robert Grosseteste, the Chancellor and Bishop, be inclined to evaluate his significance in a rather particular way? While acknowledging the existence of common ground, is it likely that, say, Ezio Franceschini, Samuel Harrison Thomson, Alasdair Crombie, Servus Gieben, Richard Dales, Leonard Boyle, and R. W. Southern (supposing we could put them all together) would be able to agree on where exactly the significance of Robert Grosseteste is to be found? Or, if we could roll back the intervening centuries, would Matthew Paris, Roger Bacon, and Thomas of Eccleston be able to reach an agreed evaluation of his significance, when we remember that each of them, even though painting to some extent from life, profiled his subject differently from the others? Perhaps the yardsticks we employ in order to evaluate the significance of historical personalities are too tied to the training, the academic investments, and the personal standpoint of each scholar to admit of a fully agreed outcome. Grosseteste's life was full of initiatives of the most varied kind. These resulted in an exceptionally diversified output of writing: philosophical and scientific treatises; commentaries on Aristotle; biblical exegesis and theological treatises; sermons, Dicta, prayers and pastoral writings; letters; and, not the least in importance/translations from the Greek. To illustrate the varied approaches one might wish to make to the significance of this versatile genius we shall concentrate successively upon six aspects of the man and his achievements: 1 The Scientist and Metaphysician 2 The Biblical Exegete 3 The Greek Scholar 4 The Lector and Bishop

4 / James McEvoy 5 The Bishop at Prayer 6 Memorials and Legacy The Scientist and Metaphysician Grosseteste's thought included inherited motifs, ideas that were old in their first conception but new to him (they were being rediscovered in his time), as well as some thoughts which were very much his own, if not indeed original. He was a true schoolman, in that he was not concerned to be or to appear original, dedicating himself instead to the transmission of the heritage he himself had received. However, he did add his own developments and suggestions at chosen points. Around the concept of light he found himself able to locate many different ideas and inspirations. Grosseteste himself did not leave behind him anything like a systematic (in the modern sense) exposition of his thought on light, so that in his case the historian of philosophy is forced to go in a piecemeal fashion about the task of reconstructing something that was (we may legitimately hypothesise) a unity in his own mind. The term 'metaphysics of light' includes the idea that the physical universe is made up of light, so that all its features, including space, time, non-living and living things, and even the spheres and the stars, are different forms taken by a single fundamental energy. The universal value of light inspired in the mind of Grosseteste the conviction that mathematics, especially geometry, holds the key to the causality of natural phenomena generally. The following lines express this viewpoint, which is at the opposite remove from the Aristotelian conviction that quantity and quality are simply different categories, and that natural explanation is essentially qualitative: There is an immense usefulness in the consideration of lines, angles and figures, because without them natural philosophy cannot be understood. They are applicable in the universe as a whole and in its parts, without restriction, and their validity extends to related properties, such as circular and rectilinear motion, as well as to action and passion, whether understood in regard to matter or to sense ... For all causes of natural effects can be discovered by lines, angles and figures, and in no other way can the reason for their action possibly be known.1

Now it was this philosophical intuition that inspired the composition of the Tractatus de luce (Treatise on Light) of Grosseteste.2 This short work outlines a cosmogony, that is, a theoretical account of how the physical

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 5 universe came into existence and took the form it actually takes, or at least that Grosseteste thought it takes. I do not know of any other work of the same character dating from medieval times, and I regard it as the original creation of a bold and powerful mind which had arrived at its fullest maturity (ca 1225-30). Out of nothing pre-existing, that is, not time nor space nor any material, God created a single point from which the entire physical order was to derive by way of extension or expansion. That first, dimensionless point was light. It was one and simple, containing matter implicitly within its light-form. Light, of course, expands by self-propagation. In its expansion that primordial light created space and extended the matter which it pre-contained into the three dimensions of a vast sphere. The multiplication or self-propagation of light can, Grosseteste argues, be understood only on the mathematical model of infinity, since the unit which at the start occupied no spatial dimensions could create tridimensionality only by an infinite self-generation. The outcome of this infinite auto-propagation, however, must itself be finite, since the power of light enters matter and so sets a quantitative determination to the infinite propagation. Now nature abhors a vacuum: like other medieval philosophers who shared similar interests, Grosseteste is fond of quoting ancient, teleologically coloured adages on nature, such as 'nature does nothing in vain/ and 'nature does not do by many means what she can do by few/ The world-sphere, therefore, must be a continuum of informed matter, for the radiation of light finds a natural boundary at the point where light and matter are perfectly balanced, and where any further expansion would begin to produce a vacuum among the particles of the continuum. We should see in Grosseteste's cosmogony of light a speculative interpretation of the biblical account of creation: 'Let there be light; and light was made' (Gen 1:3). If De luce and the various treatises on light-phenomena (colour; the behaviour of rays; the rainbow; the heat of the sun; the climates), to which it stands as a sort of framework-theory, contained all of Grosseteste's ideas on light there would, of course, be no reason whatsoever to apply the term 'metaphysics of light' to his thought. Grosseteste did not himself gather into one systematic treatise the various strands of his own thinking about light. Yet upon closer scrutiny many of his writings yield up thoughts that do indeed provide the framework for an overarching metaphysical view. This point of view is not accepted by all; however, I think it is reasonable, and justified by the evidence.3 What is no doubt the central theme of the metaphysics of light is well developed, for instance, in the Hexaemeron: it is that God is light (I Jn

6 / James McEvoy 1:5). Now, if God is truly (and not merely in some metaphorical or poetical sense) light, then clearly all that is made in his likeness, and more especially in his image, must be light of one kind or another. The whole of being, then, is light, since absolute Being and absolute Light coincide and are but one. Viewed from this fundamental perspective, each creature bears an intrinsic reference and likeness to the creator, whose infinite, true, and essential light it mirrors or symbolizes through its own finite form. It follows from this that the lux prima is incomparably more truly lux than is, for example, the sun or its light. If we are to do credit to the deepest dimensions of Grosseteste's thinking, then the metaphorics of light must be thought of as receiving a decisive underwriting in the form of the metaphysics of light; in other words, the latter overtakes the former and gives it its grounding. Grosseteste's philosophy of light was never set down by him in a fully worked-out way nor placed within the covers of a single book, but has to be reconstructed from various writings and contexts of thought. Yet it forms a fairly coherent whole, and though it owed much to Christian Platonism (to St Augustine and the Ps.-Dionysius, in particular) it has a manifestly original quality, especially in the cosmogony of De luce. The essential scheme of the philosophy of light was known to St Bonaventure through a summary of it which Adam Marsh, Grosseteste's collaborator, appears to have drawn up. Here the endeavour was made to systematize the metaphysics of light by interrelating the different regions of thought which Grosseteste himself had never drawn together into a unified discussion.4 A manifest anticipation of Huyghens's theory of the propagation of light is to be found in the ideas developed by the medieval philosopher of light. Indeed, Grosseteste's account of absolute cosmic origins from a non-dimensional point of infinitely compressed energy make the contemporary reader think quite spontaneously of the Big Bang Theory of the universe's beginnings. Among the various modern interpretations of Grosseteste's significance none has perhaps made as much impact as that of Alasdair Crombie. 'Science' enjoys unrivalled prestige at the present time, with the result that historical figures who have contributed to its rise are retrospectively bathed in reflected glory. The question about the 'significance' of Grosseteste's scientific contribution should not mislead us concerning the value and worth in his own eyes of that deep understanding of nature which he achieved: he was convinced that to understand so far as one can the workings of the universe, in light, colour, the rainbow, heat, climates, the tides, and the heavenly bodies, meant coming into the possession of an important key to the interpretation of the literal sense

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 7 of the inspired books. His Hexaemeron illustrates the point: the scientific learning which abounds there as nowhere else in his writings is placed wholly at the service of exegesis, which is only to say that it achieves what was (once again, in the eyes of its author) its truest finality. 'Significance' and estimates of it are, we may reflect, subject in a fairly radical way to historicity. The Biblical Exegete A great part of Grosseteste's significance as a Christian scholar undoubtedly lies in his exegesis. I agree with the generally held view that the Hexaemeron represents his supreme achievement in this domain. However, it is to his comment on St Paul that I turn for an illustration of that blend of scholarship and experience which marks some of his finest pages, as the educator, always present in him, rejoins the exegete of Holy Scripture. In his comment on Galatians 4:19 ('My little children, whom I labour to bring forth again ...') Grosseteste allowed himself to reflect in a personal way on the teaching role of the master. He stated his belief that truly educative teaching is best understood as an expression of love. The teacher is like a father, but he is even more like a mother giving birth to spiritual children. Grosseteste explored the metaphors of procreation, parenthood, and childbirth as expressions of the unitive power of love. The love of the magister for his disciple aims at unity. If union comes about, something is procreated in the mind of the learner - a word is formed in his consciousness. In the conviction that all love seeks to bring together the lovers and to make them as one, we can recognize at once the Augustinian influence at work. The inspiration for this passage, by the way, is to be sought, not in any of the patristic commentaries, nor in the Gloss, but in the Prayer to St Paul composed by St Anselm of Canterbury. Thinking of the same verse of Galatians, Anselm wrote, 'O St Paul, where is he that was called the nurse of the faithful, rocking his children in his arms? Who is that affectionate mother who declares everywhere that she is in labour for her sons? Sweet nurse, sweet mother, who are the sons with whom you are in labour, and nurse, but those whom by teaching the faith of Christ you bear and instruct?'5 The metaphorical employment of the notions of birth and rebirth (or regeneration) is of course biblical, but the unselfconscious employment of feminine and childbirth metaphors by these humanist exegetes of the Middle Ages lends extensive development to the scriptural usage.

8 / James McEvoy There is a striking similarity between Platonic love and Grossetestian educative love. Among other things, neither writer was embarrassed about the essential inequality in the friendship between teacher and pupil. The love of the good is the crystallizer of friendship. In the passage which follows the exegete shares with his readers his own experience as a teacher and preacher, shaped as that was by the influence of the Church and the schools upon his own life. Epistle to the Galatians, ch. 4, v. 19: 'My little children whom I am in labour to bring forth again, until Christ be formed in you.' When he says 'little children/ he shows a parental affection for them. Elsewhere he presents himself as a father, saying 'if you have ten thousand teachers, still you have not many fathers' [cf. I Cor 4:15!. Here he speaks out of maternal affection, which is the more severe. The words he speaks recall those of Moses: Have I not conceived in my womb this whole people? [Num 11:12]. These words teach us how much love we owe to disciples and what great pangs we are to endure, in order to bear them to Christ. Furthermore, by using the diminutive he conveys two things, namely at once how young they are in Christ, and how tender his own love for them is, for we develop the habit of calling by pet names those small children whom we love tenderly. Now the preacher stands as a father to those he teaches, for he casts the seed of the Word out of which they may be given life in Christ. And he is at the same time their mother, for he devotes the affection of his love to the minds of those he teaches, and it is really he who conceives the seed deposited in the understanding of his hearers. He conceives by the unheard-of love for them with which he is aflame that they may understand the Word, to love it and do it. It is he who conceives, rather than those who listen to him. Therefore, when at the price of the teacher's love, that love which becomes one with the mind of the disciple, the disciple's mind receives the Word in loving intelligence, that very love coming from the teacher it is which in the union receives the seed of the Word and conceives. The seed conceived is there in that union coagulated with the words in the memory; it is strengthened by deliberation as to how the word conceived may be brought forth into deed. Like a foetus in the womb, it is formed through reflection and effort and struggle; it is being brought to birth, as it were, and when the word is delivered in the deed, behold! the foetus is born. Since it is the painstaking and watchful love of the teacher that brings about this entire process in the learner, it is not without reason that educative love is compared to the maternal role. And when by long-

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 9 continued care taken in reprehending and rewarding, the teacher succeeds in getting the action once brought forth to be repeated constantly and from that frequent repetition to be strengthened, he is bringing the child, like one rearing it, through the stages of growth until it reaches full maturity. In the measure that this kind of begetting transcends carnal generation the teacher should be the more ready to procreate. As father, his desire to beget is the stronger, but as mother, he is rather solicitous to bear the child, is more devoted in feeding it, more fearful of a miscarriage and more grief-stricken should it occur, more tearful over a stillbirth, more joyful should he witness the development of the child. In saying 'again' ['whom I am in labour to bring forth again'] he implies that the Galatians were born but have died; he longs like a mother, with all the anxiety of grief, to bear them again into life.

No more spiritual or more existential interpretation of this passage has been discovered up to the present in the exegesis written by the Fathers of the Church and the Scholastic masters of the Middle Ages. The Greek Scholar Grosseteste's distinctive traits as a biblical exegete would not have been thinkable without that proficiency in Greek which he exhibited already around 1230. It was as a translator from the Greek that Grosseteste was to achieve celebrity on the European scale. The most popular of his versions (the Nicomachean Ethics, the Letters ofSt Ignatius, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) far outweigh his original writings in numbers of extant copies, as well as outreaching them in geographical diffusion. Indeed the Ignatian letters and the Testaments were read well beyond the university and clerical setting which formed the intended readership of his other versions. His Greek scholarship, though widely admired, was not imitated in the schools, with the result that he was to remain the only prominent school-figure to distinguish himself as a translator - and vice versa: he was the only translator who had (like John Scottus Eriugena) a distinctly speculative gift. A large part of his significance is to be found in his Greek scholarship. This aspect of his achievement was resurrected in the 19303 by Ezio Franceschini, but much remains to be done, by way of editions, in particular. How did a teaching cleric, one who conducted a school at Oxford, set about learning Greek?6 How did a bishop continue his studies at Lincoln, and expand his library? Were the obstacles placed in his way by

10 / James McEvoy the insular setting difficult to overcome? There was no precedent at Oxford, or for that matter in England, for the study of Greek and no ready-made collection of books to learn from. With all that is presently known, however, concerning the 'how' of Grosseteste's Greek apprenticeship it is perhaps more urgent to ask why he set himself to learn the language. I am convinced that the question concerning his motivation for taking it up must in the very last analysis receive an answer in terms of his own free initiative. It was not Grosseteste's absorption in the logical and physical writings of Aristotle that impelled him to learn Greek; his motivation for its study derived essentially from his devotion to the sacred books of his religion. The earliest fruits are shown in philological and textual criticism of the kind which had been the apparatus of biblicists in the Latin Church, during patristic and later times. His decision to study Greek must be understood in the light of that conception of the theologian's task to which he appears to have held steadfastly throughout his career: the theologian is above all a teacher of the Scriptures after the manner of the Fathers of the Church. He may and should employ all other forms of learning and of scholastic exercise in order to promote the central aim of his profession, namely the knowledge and appreciation of the Scriptures. To read the New Testament in Greek, as St Jerome had done; to go behind the Vulgate (the text of which was widely acknowledged to suffer from many corruptions), and to study likewise the Septuagint version of the Old Testament: this was the ideal and the goal that moved the professor to take up the serious study of Greek. There was at least one person to whom he could turn in the 12305 for assistance in perfecting his grasp of the language: John of Basingstoke, who came back to England with a knowledge of Greek and with some Greek books, after years of chaplaincy service in the Latin Duchy of Athens.7 John was appointed Archdeacon of Leicester, with the Church of St Margaret as a prebend, by Grosseteste, within a few months of the latter's episcopal consecration; in other words, he paid John the huge compliment of placing him where he had been himself only a few years earlier. To trust him so much the bishop must have known him before then. It is known that John of Basingstoke compiled a grammar (presumably a bilingual one) which he entitled Donatus Grecus. Grosseteste may have known it. It was from John that he learned of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. It is a testimony to the ease of communications with the East which then prevailed that Grosseteste was able on the basis of John's report to order the book in a copy, one which still

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 11 survives - perhaps the very one John had described.8 Grosseteste translated it, and it became one of his great successes.9 The most recent expert judgment concerning his approach to his Greek material maintains that Grosseteste's ambition was to enter the 'alien' world of Greek literary culture by seeing it through the eyes of the Greeks themselves. We may add that in his old age he garnered more information about Greek life and literature than any Latin had had at his disposal since the close of antiquity. The question I would like to ask is about the man himself: how did his Greek scholarship affect his outlook? There can be no doubt that it did so. I think it gave him a growing sympathy for the Greek part of the Church. It also sharpened his awareness of Christian antiquity. It opened a door, so to speak, into a hidden library; it was for him 'the Name of the Rose/ It alerted his mind to the commonality of Greek and Latin within the one (but divided) Church. It helped him understand at once how alike believers were, in their Christian faith, and yet how different they were in many specifics of culture, tradition, and sensibility. It enabled him to look on Latin and Greek as different cultures, to use a modern expression, without ruling out the possibility of mutual understanding between them; indeed he appears to have believed firmly in the inevitability (under Providence) of corporate reunification. By the time he became a bishop Grosseteste's growing appreciation of the Greek Fathers offered him daily confirmed evidence of the harmony in orthodox faith that had prevailed over the countless heresies which had plagued the early Christian centuries. Like Latin Christian hellenophiles both before and after him (Scottus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa), he was anguished by the quarrels which divided East and West. A note which he appended to his own translation of the Trisagion ('Holy, Holy, Holy ...') of St John Damascene deserves to be quoted in full (as John Duns Scotus did in his two major writings), for the ecumenical and eirenic quality of the confidence it professes, that the major stumblingblock in the way of unity in faith, namely thefilioque controversy, could and should be removed. The Greeks maintain that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Son, but that he does not come forth from the Son but only from the Father, through the Son however. Now this conclusion seems contrary to ours, which holds that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. It may well be, however, that were this apparent contradiction to be discussed by two doctors, a Greek and a Latin, each of them a true lover of the truth and not of his own expression of it for its own sake, it would

12 / James McEvoy eventually be clear to both of them that the difference which opposes them is not so much real as verbal. The only alternative is that either the Greeks or we, the Latins, are nothing less than heretics. But who is so foolhardy as to accuse the author of this work, John Damascene, together with the Blessed Basil, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril and other such Greek Fathers, of heresy? And who on the other hand dares to make a heretic of the Blessed Jerome, Augustine, Hilary and other such Latin Doctors? It is probable, consequently, that the opposing statements just quoted do not correspond to any real conflict between the saints, for this reason, that what is said is said in a variety of ways. For example, in the present context: 'of this person/ and similarly 'from this or that person/ or again 'through him.'10 Now it may well be that if this wide range of expression were more subtly understood and analysed, it would emerge clearly that the doctrine which finds opposing expressions is in fact the same."

Here we have a concrete case wherein what the late Beryl Smalley referred to as Grosseteste's preference for scholarship over dialectic allowed him to bring the full warmth of his humanity to bear upon a difficulty which in the eyes of the great majority of his contemporaries appeared irresolubly great. The Lector and Bishop

Our survey of Grosseteste's significance seems to suggest, up to this point, that it is to be sought in his achievements as a Christian scholar, a thinker, a translator, and a writer. But is 'significance' to be understood only, or chiefly, in terms of successful activity? In his person he was someone special, a very remarkable human being. I would venture to say that we can come to know him better, more subjectively, more from within, than we can any of the other great schoolmen, or even bishops, of his time. He had no biographer, but he was remembered by the friars, and some of those memories have reached us in the form of precious anecdotes. Whatever significance Grosseteste's life may have had in his own eyes lay, we may suppose, in serving God through the Church. He was deeply conscious of his pastoral responsibilities, as teacher and later as bishop. The Franciscans were by virtue of their vocation particularly attuned to this dimension of their hero and benefactor. Their testimonies may be invoked here with regard to this fundamental aspect of his life and of his significance.

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 13 It was undoubtedly with the Franciscans that Grosseteste felt most at home. With them he worked hardest and relaxed most completely, and by them he was very kindly remembered. Many of the more intimate insights we can gain into his character come from the memories of friars. The warmest illustrations of his friendship with them is to be found in Thomas of Eccleston's account of the coming of the Friars Minor to England, a chronicle written around 1250 by a Franciscan who, though not himself a scholar, in all probability had a personal memory of the former lector. Eccleston first tells how Grosseteste came, by invitation, to the friars' school, and in a much later chapter he records a medley of anecdotes about the bishop, bringing us closer to his warm, wise, and witty personality than does any other source.12 The association of Robert with the Franciscans supplies a vital clue to the nature of his own religious idealism, for as he grew older, in years and in faith, he saw ever more clearly that the stricter, more evangelical following of Christ implies the renunciation of possessions, of egoism, and of worldliness of all kinds. In a brief meditation, for instance, Grosseteste indicated the outlook from which generous almsgiving comes, in terms of a paradox of loss and gain: 'You should meditate that you will inevitably die; that you cannot put off your death; that you cannot prolong your life against the will of God; that of what you own you can take nothing with you, unless what for God's sake you gave away.'13 Is there not a perceptibly Franciscan overtone to the following remark also? 'Note that when you see somebody doing wrong you should not immediately judge him but should regard him with compassion, considering that if you were to have such temptations you might [have reason to] fear you would do even worse.'14 Compassion, we may note, is here considered to consist in the love of the sinner for the sinner, of the fragile for the frail. It is worth remarking that while Grosseteste welcomed the arrival of the first two mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans, at the same time he showed discernment in evaluating the worth of new religious movements. A note in one of the manuscripts of Eccleston's chronicle informs the reader that in one particular case the bishop acted radically, expelling from his diocese the Crucified Brethren, or, to give them their full title, 'the Brothers of the Order of St Mary of the Order of the Crucified Ones.' The bishop was apparently unmoved by the protection which the King had extended to this group, whose members had royal permission to beg for alms. The St Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris, gives 1244 as the year of their arrival in England.15

14 / James McEvoy If Grosseteste really did understand so well the mind of St Francis, why then did he encourage the friars towards learning, by becoming their teacher? His contemporary, the strictly Franciscan Thomas of Eccleston, saw no conflict in Robert's attitude, as the following story reveals. Friar Peter of Tewkesbury was worthily favoured by the special love of the Bishop of Lincoln, and more than once did he hear from him many secrets of his wisdom. For he remarked to him once that unless the friars cultivated study and applied themselves studiously to the law of God, we would certainly end up in the same state as other religious, whom we see, alas! walking in the darkness of ignorance.

Like any gift, however, learning, and even preaching, is open to abuse on the part of the self-seeking and the ambitious. Again it is Eccleston who, in an anecdote, has supplied us with a key to Grosseteste's attitude: He said that he rejoiced when his students were not paying attention to his lecture, even if he had prepared it rather carefully; because, of course, he would have no occasion for vainglory - and at the same time he would not lose any of his merit!

Living as he did in a society in which the gift played a fundamental and irreplaceable part, Grosseteste had to have a sharp eye for anything resembling a bribe: And the same Friar Peter [of Tewkesbury] told how, when the Lord Robert, the Bishop of Lincoln, was in great need of horses at the time of his elevation, his seneschal came to him, found him seated at his books, and announced to him that two white [i.e., Cistercian] monks had come to present him with two lovely palfreys. And when [the seneschal] pressed him to receive them and pointed out that [the monks] were exempt, he would not agree, nor even rise from his place, but said, 'If I took them, they would drag me by their tails down to hell!'

Cistercian monks were, of course, exempt from episcopal jurisdiction. The seneschal was implying that no strings were attached to the gift, but the bishop-elect was not naive enough to behave as though episcopal influence ended at the limits of the actual jurisdiction of his diocese. It seems likely, by the way, that Grosseteste as bishop, and perhaps even

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 15 as Council Father (at Lyons, in 1245) opposed the growing tendency on the part of Cistercians to appropriate parishes to their monasteries. Perhaps this incident shows him already keeping his distance, in order to retain the objectivity required of the spiritual ruler. The bishop was particular in matters of money, especially when there was any likelihood of usurious practice. Eccleston, who evidently regarded him as being quite incorruptible, approved: Moreover, when the chamberlain of the Lord Pope asked him for a thousand pounds due on the occasion of his visit to the Curia, wishing him to raise them from merchants, he replied that he did not want to place the people in question in the occasion of mortal sin; if, on the other hand, he got safely back to England he would deposit the required sum with the Templars in London; otherwise not a halfpenny would be forthcoming.16 This incident should very likely be located in 1245, that year which the bishop spent almost entirely at Lyons, having much business to conduct through the curia. Eccleston was a simple man, yet he understood admirably Grosseteste's central objection against harmful provisions: Again, he said to Friar John de Dya to look out for six or seven suitable clerics from his parts [France] whom he might appoint to offices in his Church. Even if they did not know English they could preach by their example.17 It is evident from this that it was not for their ignorance of English that he refused the Pope's candidates and the nephews of cardinals, but because they were only out for temporal ends. In the same spirit, when a lawyer in the curia said to him, The canons [canones] require this/ his answer was, 'Exactly, the canines [canes, lit. 'dogs'] want it.' Grosseteste's attitude to the vow of poverty was remembered: The aforementioned friar, William [of Nottingham] once said that when the Lord Bishop of Lincoln of holy memory, at the time when he was the official lector to the Friars Minor at Oxford, was preaching on poverty at a chapter of the friars, and placed the mendicant state at the next rung on the ladder of poverty to the embrace of heavenly things, he yet remarked to him in private that there was a still higher grade, namely to live from the rewards of one's own labour; whence he said

16 / James McEvoy that the Beguines have the most perfect and holy religious order, because they live by their own work and do not burden all and sundry with exactions.18

He was ready also with practical advice and encouragement: 'He remarked to him [Peter] that houses (loco) above water are not healthy unless placed well up. Another time he said that it pleased him greatly when he saw the sleeves of the friars patched. Once he observed that pure pepper was better than salted ginger/ Eccleston tells us that St Francis once forced Br Albert of Pisa, when they were staying together at a hospice, to eat twice as much as usual, for his health's sake. In a similar vein Grosseteste gave unexpected advice to a scrupulous Dominican (most likely a priest) and to a Franciscan, in the following terms: Moreover, he said to a friar preacher, 'Three things are necessary for temporal well-being: food, sleep and merriment!' On another occasion he enjoined upon a certain friar who was melancholic to drink a cupful of the best wine for his penance; and when he had drained it, albeit with much aversion, he told him, 'My dear brother, if you had that penance a few times you would end up with a better conscience!'

There is also an amusing, and very human, story of the bishop in a huff: The Lord Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, was once so badly vexed that the Minister [Provincial] did not permit a certain friar whom he had once had with him to remain in his guest house, that he refused to talk to any friar at all, even to his confessor! And on that occasion Brother Peter declared to him that if he were to give all his goods to the friars but refused to give them the affection of his heart, the friars would not care for his gift. And the bishop began to weep and said, 'In truth it is you [the Franciscans] who are at fault, in that you cause me too much pain, for I cannot not love you, even if I show you the face I do!' Yet the friars ate at his own table beside him, and still he would not talk to them!

Finally, it is from the Chronicle of Lanercost that a very well-authenticated Franciscan story comes, of the bishop's falling asleep in the middle of ordinations being held on Gaudete Sunday - the only licit day for ordinations during Lent:

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 17 It happened that Bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln, [a man] beloved of God, was to perform solemn ordinations at Huntingdon during Lent. One of the Minorite Order, who is still alive, though greatly aged, and living at Doncaster, was present there. He himself received ordination and was a witness to the course of events. He describes what took place in the following manner: 'After Mass began/ said he, 'and the bishop was seated on his throne, the clerk who had the job of reading out the names of the ordinands for presentation to the bishop came forward with the roll. And since he was very slow in reading the list, the bishop leaned his head upon the side of his seat and fell asleep! After the clergy had hesitated for some time, wondering what to do, he was gently awakened by one of his secretaries.'19

This story I find curiously touching on the human level: it has little or no substance or point to it; but the fact that one friar remembered all his life the old bishop's falling asleep in the middle of the ordination ceremony, and that another thought this worth recording and authenticating, is (to my eyes) eloquent: its only purpose was to remember him just as he was, in other words in his humanity, in his age and frailty - simply because he was the truly great man he was. Is this not the kind of story one recounts only out of fondness for a person whose memory one reveres? Robert himself would not have regretted being depicted in weakness, I feel. It is believed on the testimony of the well-known Parisian scholastic, Master Godfrey of Fontaines, that the Bishop of Lincoln forbade the executors of his last will and testament to allow his body following his death to be dismembered in the manner common at the time, and buried one part here one part there in several different places.20 This information has been regarded as belonging to the currently fashionable 'history of the body/ However, for my own part I prefer to regard it as an aspect of the story of a soul. It is my belief that the bishop's interdiction was not simply the product of his distaste for the current practice (a distaste that was evidently widely felt), but was designed to discourage the distribution of his remains over several different locations, where they might be venerated as holy relics. En passant, let us note that the failure of all efforts aiming at his canonisation, that failure which has disappointed more than one historian,21 would not have surprised Robert himself, for he certainly did not believe that he was a saint. On the other hand, there was never a saint who did not have personal faults to contend with! Grosseteste had faults (including impatience and severity), but he was

i8 / James McEvoy a man of great, even heroic, virtue, was full of Christian faith, and remained prayerful and self-sacrificing to the end. We are surely entitled to think of him as belonging to the uncountable number of the uncanonised saints. The stories recorded by Franciscan chroniclers speak to us eloquently of the love the friars had for Bishop Robert Grosseteste and the respect in which they held him. Through the oral tradition which the stories reflect we have a memorable access to a personality who is known to us not only better than any other of the great academic figures of the time, but differently than the others: we feel we know him somewhat from within, even down to his human qualities and his foibles, which we are allowed to see through the eyes of poor and simple fratelli. Do these memories not come closer than do other estimates to the way in which Robert probably looked at the meaning of his own life, namely in terms of a teacher, priest, and bishop? Cannot they stand as indicators of his truest significance? And if we allow them to do so, may we not think of him as 'doctor amabilis'? Robertus Lincolniensis, doctor amabilis: that title would, I feel, have pleased him, if only because it would relate him implicitly to the Doctor amoris, Augustine of Hippo, who was his ideal as pastor and bishop. The Bishop at Prayer Something is known, fortunately, of Robert Grosseteste's inner sanctum, not only indirectly, through the observations of the friars, but also through glimpses of him at prayer. First in this regard must come a word about the French prayers which have reached us, and which reveal something of Bishop Grosseteste's piety, as observed, and indeed shared, by a member of hisfamilia. The shorter is introduced (in Lambeth Palace MS 499)" by the phrase (in Latin), 'He used to say this after a meal.' The prayer (or should one not say, the catena of prayers?) begins, 'Deu seit od nus par sa pite ../ I translate it as follows: God be with us through his mercy, and defend us from evil and sin, and grant us to do his will, and keep us in health, and lead us to be agreeable to the living and merciful to the dead. Item, may God grant us to live well and to die well, and to come to the great joy. Item, may God be with us and grant us his grace and a good end and vitam eternam. Item primo Benedicite, and the response, Dominus nos custodial et ab omni malo defendat et ad vitam eternam perducat.

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 19 A prayer to St Margaret is authenticated by the words, "Oracio eiusdem ad sanctam Margaretam, quam eciam dicere solebat magister Salomon socius eius' ('A prayer of the same [bishop] to St Margaret, which Master Solomon, his assistant, used to say also'). Solomon of Dover was a trusted member of Grosseteste's/amz'/za, who served for a time as the bishop's personal chaplain before succeeding none other than John of Basingstoke as Archdeacon of Leicester, in -1252.^ Regarding Grosseteste's devotion to St Margaret we may recall that he held the living of St Margaret's, Leicester, during the years when he was Archdeacon of Leicester (1229-32). (If his mother was called Margaret that would account for his predilection for the name; but we shall never know.) In the prayer, Robert of Lincoln comes before his 'Dame Seinte Margarete' like a knight pledged to uphold her honour before the whole world, while at the same time suing for her intercession with the King on his own behalf: Glorious lady, Saint Margaret, I come to implore you, and thank you again, that you have pity on me, in the same way that I have chosen you next to God and His gentle Mother, Our Lady Mary, and before all others. And to you will I turn above all other ladies now or to be, and I will love and honour you above all other ladies to the best of my ability, and the grace that God will grant me as a result of your request. As truly I have never, by the grace of God, had it in my thoughts to pollute my body with the stain of the flesh, or any other stain, and also truly because I have honoured to the best of my feeble ability all women for the love of you (whom I love above all others), and especially those who are named after you, [I pray you] be my help before God the allpowerful, my Creator. May He have mercy on me in His holy pity and through your holy prayer, and may He pardon my sins and give me grace so that I may be able sic transire per tempora ['to go through this world'] ut non amittam eterna ['in such a way as not to lose eternal life']. And please heed my prayer for your assistance before my Creator, so that through His mercy and your prayer I may, if it please Him, feel His grace abundant in me. And I promise faithfully to you that if God grant that I may be a worthy man on this earth, I shall give to you all the honour I can, and shall bring others to honour you, and shall honour you in such a way that others will be edified by the good example shown in me by our Lord, through His grace which is our help.24

The prayer finishes with a Latin concluding formula: 'Quod mihi prestare dignetur et cetera' ('Which may He deign to grant me, etc.'). Let

2o / James McEvoy us note in passing that it makes a notable claim to the preservation of its author's chastity. This would seem to rule out the notion that he was married before becoming a deacon. As a prayer it may be a bit longwinded for modern tastes, but it is warmly devotional in the style of the prayers to saints by St Anselm of Canterbury, who was a model for later prayer writers, and was indeed the inventor of this genre. Phrases of Latin are incorporated into it, for its author's tongue was ready in both languages when it came to praying. To have this glimpse into his private devotional life adds a rare and welcome touch of intimacy to our knowledge of the man he was. Other glimpses of Grosseteste's private devotional life are given in his sermons and Dicta, but these are lateral and inexplicit by comparison with the written prayers that survive. One is struck by the number and quality of the sermons he preached to monastic audiences, both before and (especially) after becoming bishop. He was not afraid to exhort to constant prayer the monks and nuns whom he addressed, with an emphasis on doing penance both for personal sins and for those of the whole world. In other words, even before becoming a bishop he gave quite unself-conscious, authoritative, and personal leadership to the praying Church. Numerous Dicta exemplify his own contemplative prayer in notes he made essentially for his own use. The title of one of the edited pieces might stand for the theme common to many of them: Omnis creatura speculum est: every creature is a mirror, in which some dim outlines (vestigia) of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God can be discerned.25 Much of his personal prayer no doubt took the form of starting from a concrete experience or object and rising (ascensio, the Augustinian access to contemplatio) through the grades of creation towards the Creator and the Redeemer. The same sources illustrate the biblical foundation of his prayer, and the use he made of the monastic method of lectio divina, or the slow, repetitive recitation of a biblical phrase, allowing it to touch the affective depths and by so doing to alter the attitudes that shape action. The Psalms and the Pauline writings, in addition to the four Gospels, were approached by him in this manner, as his biblical exegesis reveals; there is, for instance, a great deal of contemplatio lying behind the comment he made on the Fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22).26 In his later years Grosseteste became aware of the mystical current in theology, and of the prayer of abandonment it encouraged, but it may be doubted whether his own soul ever stood 'above all things, and above itself, in the cloud of the actual unknowing of itself and of all, waiting until the Beloved may manifest Himself to it' - his own eloquent resume of the Greek mystical current, made in conscious dependence upon the

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 21 close of the second chapter of the Mystical Theology of the PseudoAreopagite.27 It may be conjectured that his personal form of mysticism consisted in a devout and tender sense of the constant presence of God within the soul and at the very depth of its experience, and in the response to that, made up of penance, praise, affective contemplatio, and self-renunciation. This kind of prayer encouraged him in the search for a balance between contemplation and action, especially pastoral action. His prayerful approach to pastoral work was nourished by the constant reading of the Bible, as well as by that of favourite Patristic works on the shepherd-theme, such as Augustine's Sermo ad Pastores and Gregory the Great's Regula Pastoralis. The mark left on him by St Bernard included a tender, personal devotion to Mary in her joy and her sorrows, which is palpable in one or two of the sermons and also in the Chasteau d'Amour. In order to learn more about his practice of prayer and his attitude to it we must await, in particular, the full edition of the Dicta and the sermons. Memorials and Legacy A number of objects have come down to us which bring us close to the daily life of Robert of Lincoln. Some of the books (both Greek and Latin) from his library have survived, and a few of them even have words and phrases written in the margins in his own hand.28 No signature of his has been identified, but on the other hand his seal is affixed to several documents.29 One of these is the lengthy Transsumpta, the list of papal claims and privileges which was drawn up in support of the pope and in defence of the Patrimony of Peter against the incursions of the Emperor Frederic. Pope Innocent IV attached great strategic importance to this document, with the result that the forty or so leading representatives of Latin Christendom were asked to append their seal to its cover folio.30 The seals, Grosseteste's among them, survive on the Vatican copy (they were removed from the Paris one).31 It is chipped and fractured but still decipherable. On the recto it depicts the Sedes Sapientiae surrounded by the Angelic Salutation, 'Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum' - a reminder that the Cathedral of Lincoln was (and is) dedicated to Our Lady. On the verso is a bishop, with two spectators in windows who appear to be looking outwards upon the bishop, as a model of life. The legend reads: 'Robertus Dei Gratia Episcopus Lincolniensis.' Among the objects discovered in the bishop's tomb when it was opened in 1782, and currently conserved in the Treasury of Lincoln

22 / James McEvoy Cathedral, one is the bearer of an inscription which is worth a moment's attention.32 It is the hoop of his crozier, and is made of silver. (The crozier itself, being of wood, perished within a short time of being exposed to the air, leaving behind, aside from the hoop itself, only its iron foot.) Six words are engraved in capitals around its edges: PER BACULIFORMAM PRELATIDISCITO NORMAN - the last word should of course be 'normam' (law, rule). The legend may be rendered (or paraphrased) thus: "Through the shape of the staff, learn the ideal of prelacy' - namely, that the bishop is to be a shepherd in regard to his flock. The memoir by Sir Joseph Banks FRS (dated Lincoln 1782) recounts, by the way, that the curved head of the pastoral staff ended in the shape of a lamb's head; this completed the shepherd symbolism.33 There can be no doubt that Grosseteste himself chose this motif during the time when he was preparing himself for his episcopal consecration. The evidence for this claim is quite specific, and is found in Dictum 35, which, like all 147 Dicta in the major collection, was composed (according to the prefatory note which he placed at the beginning of the work) while he was still lecturing. This item is in reality a sermon addressed to clergy, including higher clergy (it may have been preached while he was Archdeacon of Leicester). The preacher took his theme from I Tim 4:12: 'Exemplum esto fidelium in verbo, in conversatione, in caritate, in fide, in castitate/ Each word receives an explanation, or at least an illustration or two. An ingenious example is given regarding the 'conversatio' (way of living) of clergy: they are to 'consider' that when one looks into another human eye one sees one's own form and image reflected there; in like manner, everyone who looks at the way of life of the clergy ought to be able to perceive in them 'the form and the norm/ for himself, of right living. The word forma has biblical overtones that resonate here (cf. I Pet 5:3; Phil 2:6-7), whereas norma is not used in the Scriptures; Grosseteste chose it simply for the purpose of rhyming.34 The intended visual effect of the inscription on the staff hoop is marred by a distraction, namely the misspelling of 'normam' as 'norman/ The artisan may have realised, all too late, that no space was left for the final m. When presented with his crozier prior to his consecration the future bishop, whatever the annoyance he felt at the mistake, was evidently prepared to live with it rather than put his see to the expense of ordering a new hoop for his staff, purely for the sake of a single missing letter! The purpose of the sacred artifact was, after all, not inspection but

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 23 prayer. As he carried it at ceremonies, the symbolism was a reminder to Bishop Robert to plead for the grace of his state in life to be constantly renewed by God's favour. Several memorials to the great Bishop of Lincoln exist. They deserve mention at the close of this study. First, the tomb: situated in the far corner of the southeast transept, the present raised stone is a replacement for the medieval original, a marble tomb with a brass image of the bishop, which was destroyed during the Civil War, in i644.35 The very handsome slab was designed by Randoll Blacking in 1953 (the seventh centenary year). Engraved on it are the insignia of a bishop, and the name: Robert Grosseteste Bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253-36 The nearby Chapel of St Peter and St Paul has come to be referred to as the Grosseteste Chapel and is associated with education, in his honour. Annually on the morning of 9 October a service (designed many years ago by Canon J.H. Strawley) is held at the tomb. Also on the anniversary of his death, the Bishop Grosseteste Lecture is delivered in the Chapter House by an invited lecturer. The Bishop Grosseteste College of Education was established by the Diocese of Lincoln in 1862 for teacher training, and still continues its work. The building of Lincoln Minster continued throughout Grosseteste's years as bishop. We have no indication regarding the nature or extent of his interest in it. One supposes that the leading part in the financing of the project and in its supervision was taken by the dean and some members of the chapter. Legend, however, associates the name of Bishop Grosseteste with the statue known as 'The Swineherd of Stowe' (a copy of the original; the figure is shown blowing a herdsman's horn). This is placed on top of the northern pinnacle of the facade of the cathedral. The parallel statue crowning the southern pinnacle represents St Hugh. It is said that the swineherd gave generously, despite his poverty, to the appeal on behalf of the cathedral building fund. Perhaps it was Grosseteste who decided that the poor herdsman and the saintly bishop would be commemorated forever together. A window in the Chapter House of the Cathedral at Lincoln commemorates the episcopal ministry of Grosseteste. The three portions of the window represent his reform of the monasteries, his visit to Lyons in 1250, and his visitation of the Chapter of Lincoln. Each of the three scenes is identified by a caption written in Latin. Notable is the wording of the second caption: Grosseteste Epi[scopi] coram Romae Pontfifice] Intrepida Protestatio AD MCCL.

24 / James McEvoy Canon George Gresley Perry is considered to have been the designer of this window. He is commemorated in another of the windows. He was the author of a book on Bishop Grosseteste, whom he regarded as a straightforward harbinger of the Protestant Reformation.37 Great St Mary's is the University Church at Cambridge. A series of windows in the St Andrew's Chapel commemorates a number of saints, including St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Among them is Robert Grosseteste, depicted as a bishop. The set of windows, made by an artist called Hogan and glazed in 1922 by Messrs James Powell and Son of Whitefriars, London, commemorates the ministry of Archdeacon William Cunningham, who was vicar of Great St Mary's from 1887 to 1908. The saints represented were chosen apparently because Dr Cunningham had discussed them in his historical publications. Our final word must be addressed to the spiritual legacy of Robert Grosseteste, which is still being recovered from his books. The claim made by Possidius concerning the books of St Augustine may be applied to those of the Bishop of Lincoln: From these [books], God be thanked, we can know his quality and importance as a churchman; in them he will always be alive for the faithful... From the writings of this priest, so pleasing and dear to God, it is clear, as far as the light of truth allows humans to see, that he led a life of uprightness and integrity in the faith, hope and love of the Catholic Church ... I believe, however, that they profited even more who were able to hear him speaking in church and see him there present, especially if they were familiar with his manner of life among his fellow human beings.38

The legacy to the Franciscans at Oxford of a number of the books he himself had written ensured that these would not be forgotten. Evidence of their consultation and close study comes from the late thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth centuries. The codices were kept on shelves of their own in the library of the priests; some of their catalogue numbers are known through Thomas Gascoigne. In a display case close by the bishop's rush slippers were preserved. We know that these relics continued to be valued, for when John Leland, the royal agent for the suppression of the Oxford Friary, arrived in 1538, he had to report to Thomas Cromwell that the books of Bishop Grosseteste had vanished 'stolen by the Franciscans themselves.' We may imagine that the friars as they broke up their community distributed the precious relics of their

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 25 first lector among themselves, for safe keeping in the various houses of lay people where they sought refuge, rather than see the books sequestrated and profaned. It should not be forgotten that the survival of so many of Grosseteste's writings is due not to accident but to the devotion of a number of anonymous scholars and copyists who, during two generations or more following the death of the bishop, laboured to collect in particular his sermons and letters, with a view to their preservation. Much care was devoted to the correct copying of his translations from the Greek, in particular; the best example is probably his version of the four Dionysian works, the earliest exemplars of which are of outstanding textual quality. The modern editor of any writing by Grosseteste comes to be conscious of following in the footsteps of many men who are nameless - copyists, scholars, editors - on whose shoulders we continue to stand. The legacy of Robert Grosseteste will be available in all its intellectual and spiritual dimensions only when all his writings have been critically edited ad usum scholarium, and indeed translated for the benefit of the wider readership that still awaits them. NOTES Thanks are owed, and are hereby returned, to Professor Joseph Goering, for his invitation to take part in the Toronto Grosseteste conference and for letting me see a transcription of many of the Dicta; and also to my Maynooth colleague, Ms Mette Lebech, for reading the text and making valuable suggestions for its improvement. 1 De Lineis, Angulis et Figuris, in Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, ed. Ludwig Baur (Miinster i. W.: Aschendorf, 1912). The translation is my own. 2 Ibid. Several English translations exist, the most accessible of which is to be found in Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, eds., Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 434-40. 3 Prof. Andreas Speer has a different outlook: "'Lux est Prima Forma Corporalis": Lichtphysik oder Lichtmetaphysik bei Robert Grosseteste/ in Medioevo. Rivista di Storia della Filosofia Medievale 20 (1994), 51-76. See the same author's 'Licht und Raum. Robert Grossetestes spekulative Grundlegung einer scientia naturdis,' in Raum und Raumvorstellungen im Mittelalter, ed. J.A. Aertsen and A. Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 25 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1998), 77-100.

26 / James McEvoy 4

5 6

7 8 9 10

11

12

13

Servus Gieben, 'Robert Grosseteste and Adam Marsh on Light in a Summary Attributed to St Bonaventure/ in Aspectus et Affectus, ed. Gunar Freibergs (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 17-35'Oratio ad sanctum Paulum/ in S. Anselmi Opera Omnia, ed. Franciscus S. Schmitt, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1958), 33-41. Professor A.C. Dionisotti has set down her valuable ideas on Grosseteste's learning of Greek: 'On the Greek Studies of Robert Grosseteste/ in The Uses of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, ed. A.C. Dionisotti, A. Graf ton, and J. Kraye, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 16 (London: Warburg, 1988), 19-39. Appendix II, 'Grosseteste's Greek Library/ will be consulted with profit. See the article on John by J. McEvoy, in the New Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming). Cambridge University MS Ff. 1.24; late tenth century, with notes in Grosseteste's hand. For an appreciation of it see Dionisotti, 'Greek Studies/ 29. The prepositions 'of/ 'from/ and 'through' refer of course to the various expressions of the procession of the Holy Spirit: 'of the Father and the Son; 'from' the Father and the Son; 'through' the Son. For a detailed comment on the Notula see J. McEvoy, 'The Absolute Predestination of Christ in the Theology of Robert Grosseteste/ in Sapientiae Doctrina: Melanges de Theologie et de Litterature medievales offerts a Dom Hildebrand Bascour O.S.B., Recherches de Theologie ancienne et medievale, no. special i (Louvain: Peeters, 1980), 212-30. R.W. Southern has a brief discussion of the topic: Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 231-2. Contrast in this regard the anecdotes recorded by the Franciscan chronicler with the stories retailed or invented by the chronicler of St Albans Abbey, Matthew Paris. Again and again the latter shows himself unable to resist the temptation to tamper with the truth for the sake of dramatic effect (or worse). One example of this tendency relates to the collapse of the tower of Lincoln Cathedral which took place in 1237, on account (according to Abbot John of Peterborough) of poor construction. Matthew adorns the story, recounting that one of the canons, while preaching to the people in the cathedral and complaining of the tyranny of the bishop [Grosseteste], exclaimed, 'If we should hold our peace, the very stones would cry out' - whereupon the tower collapsed on top of him. Chronica Majora (R.S.) 3, 529. J. Goering and F.A.C. Mantello, 'The Meditaciones of Robert Grosseteste/ Journal of Theological Studies 36 (1985), 118-28, at 127.

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 27 14 See Servus Gieben, 'Robert Grosseteste and the Evolution of the Franciscan Order/ in McEvoy, ed., Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives on His Thought and Scholarship, Instrumenta Patristica 27 (Steenbrugge: St Peter's, 1995), 215-32, at 219. 15 Fratris Thomae ... De Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam, ed. Andrew G. Little (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951), 103. The order appears to have been short-lived. 16 The Temple functioned as an international exchange and delivery service, but its officers were careful to avoid usurious practices. 17 They could, of course, actually minister to the Anglo-Norman speakers. 18 Lambert le Begue (= 'the stutterer'), a contemporary of St Francis, founded a poverty movement known as the Beghards/Beguines. 19 Chronicle ofLanercost, 1272-1246, transl. Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow: Maclehose, 1913), 159-60. 20 Jean Hoffmans, Le huitieme quodlibet de Godejroid de Fontaines, (Louvain: Nauwelaert, 1924), 94. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani translates this text in a very interesting article on the medieval practices and the condemnation they finally drew from the papacy (1299): 'L'eglise medievale et la renaissance de l'anatomie,' Revue Medicale de la Suisse Romande 109 (1989), 987-91. 21 Eric Kemp collected all that has come to light concerning the prosecution of the case for Grosseteste's canonisation: 'The Attempted Canonisation of Robert Grosseteste,' in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. Daniel A. Callus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 241-6. 22 Studied by Joseph Goering and F.A.C. Mantello, 'Notus in ludea Deus: Robert Grosseteste's Confessional Formula in Lambeth Palace MS 499,' Viator 18 (1987), 253-73. 23 Kathleen Major, 'The Familia of Robert Grosseteste,' in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, 216-41; in particular, 226-7. 24 This translation has been based (with a few corrections) on the text printed by S. Harrison Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1235-1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 157. 25 Ed. by Servus Gieben, 'Traces of God in Nature according to Robert Grosseteste. With the Text of the Dictum, Omnis Creatura Speculum Est,' Franciscan Studies 24 (1964), 144-58. 26 Translated in full in McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 185-7. 27 The lengthy sermon for Easter Sunday from which this quotation is taken has been edited: James McEvoy, 'Robert Grosseteste's Theory of Human Nature. With the Text of His Conference, Ecclesia Sancta

28 / James McEvoy

28

29

30

31

32

33 34 35 36

Celebrat,' in Recherches de Theologie ancienne et medievale 47 (1980), 131-87. The reader may care to examine the plate of a page from Grosseteste's own copy of the Moralia of St Gregory the Great, annotated by the owner; it is reproduced in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop (facing title page). Kathleen Major remarked on the paucity of original acta of Bishop Grosseteste, and deplored the poor quality of the surviving seals (The Familia of Robert Grosseteste/ 216). Major was not aware of the sealcopy conserved at Sens Cathedral. It is attached to a letter of Grosseteste which, together with one of Fulk Bassett, Bishop of London, accompanied their report to the pope on the inquiry they conducted in England into the holiness of Edmund Rich/of Abingdon; see Clifford H. Lawrence, St Edmund of Abingdon: A Study of Hagiography and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), Appendix E: 'The Muniments in the Tresor of Sens Cathedral/ 21 (p. 321). This request may have been made on the occasion when each one of the 160 or so bishops attending the Council was received by Pope Innocent IV, who took in his own hands those of the bishop and asked him to promise to be a faithful upholder of the See of Peter in its present troubles. These interviews would have taken place at the Collegiale St Just, situated on the ridge above the Saone, where the Pope and curia were in residence. Most of the bishops would presumably have taken lodgings in the streets running up to the Church of St Irenee, in the crypt of which the remains of the titular saint were buried along with those of the other martyrs of the persecution of AD 177. Conserved in the Vatican Archives (A.A.ARM I-XVIII, 98, n. 8, recto and verso). Though Grosseteste's seal is damaged, it possesses historical value by virtue of the notable occasion on which it was applied. J.W. Francis Hill, The Tomb of Robert Grosseteste with an Account of its Opening in 1782,' in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, 246-50. See the drawing, made at the time of opening, reproduced facing p. 249. J.W.F. Hill (otherwise known as Sir Francis Hill) was the author of the richly informative Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 487 pp. Hill, The Tomb of Robert Grosseteste/ 249. I am indebted to Professor Joseph Goering for allowing me to see a transcription of Dictum 35. Hill, The Tomb of Robert Grosseteste/ 246-50. We have it on the authority of Salimbene that Friar Adam Marsh O.F.M. was also buried in the Cathedral at Lincoln. If this was so it was cer-

Robert Grosseteste: The Man and His Legacy / 29 tainly on account of his association with Grosseteste. So far as I am aware, no trace of his grave has ever been found. 37 George Gresley Perry, The Life and Times of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (London: Christian Knowledge Society, 1871). 38 Possidio, Vita di S. Agostino. Introduzione, testo critico, versione e note a cura di Michele Pellegrino, Edizioni Paoline (n.d.), c. 31, p. 192. The English translation used above is taken from The Life of Saint Augustine by Possidius, Bishop ofCalama. Introduction and Notes by Cardinal M. Pellegrino, ed. J.E. Rotelle, O.S.A., The Augustinian Series, vol. I (Villanova: Augustinian Press, 1988), 130.

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JAMES R. GINTHER

2 The Super Psalterium in Context

For the last half-century, students of the life and works of Robert Grossesteste have employed the descriptor "scholar and bishop' as a means of summarising this English thinker's long and remarkable life.1 It has also guided modern readers through the large corpus of writings that Grosseteste penned. Grosseteste was a scholar of the natural world, who wrote treatises on cosmology, meteorology, and optics - to name but three major fields of his research.2 He was also a philosophical scholar who committed to vellum his reflections on Aristotelian logic, mathematical theory, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology.3 His accomplishments as bishop were equally significant. He was a principal protagonist in reinvigorating episcopal visitations, much to the chagrin of his detractors.4 Above all, he is known for his promotion of the pastoral care. He protected the cure of souls by ensuring that all pastoral appointments in his diocese strictly fulfilled canonical requirements. As his letter collection reveals, he never shifted his position in response to a candidate's patron, be he a fellow bishop, a noble, or even the king.5 He also did all that he could to improve the context of church ministry, which included the publication of an influential set of diocesan statutes that implemented the ministerial programs of the Fourth Lateran Council.6 In the last years of his episcopacy, he took his campaign for a more rigorous program of pastoral care to the papal court, where he produced a memorandum designed to inform Innocent IV of the problems threatening pastoral ministry in the English church.7 Grosseteste's interest in the pastoral care emerged well before he became bishop. Prior to 1235, he had helped bridge the gap between the theory of the pastoral care expounded in the schools, and parish practice. His ability to translate complex theological ideas into usable terms and practices for a literate clergy won his pastoral writings a great

32 / James R. Ginther deal of popularity. One of his earlier works, the Templum Dei, has survived in over ninety manuscripts, copied throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.8 Moreover, it is within these texts that one can see how the interests of a philosophical and scientific scholar merged with the concerns of a pastor, for he employed the most recent theories of the psychological make-up of humanity in his pastoral writings.9 The description of Grosseteste as scholar and bishop often overshadows the fact that his theological interests did not focus solely on pastoral ministry. He was also a master of theology at Oxford, and during his tenure he produced a number of biblical commentaries and theological tractates.10 Even after he was elected bishop of Lincoln in 1235, Grosseteste continued his theological study. Despite being the bishop of the largest diocese in England, he found time to study and write, and by that time had added to his repertoire of skills knowledge of Greek. He translated the Dionysian corpus, the major works of John Damascene, and rendered for the first time in Latin the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs.11 He also produced a new translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, which he considered to be a good source for pastoral education.12 Despite writing a plethora of theological works in his lifetime, it is this biographical element, Grosseteste as theologian, that is the least developed in modern scholarship. One of the major reasons for this stems from the work of Grosseteste's most important bibliographer, S. Harrison Thomson. In cataloguing some 120 works ascribed to Grosseteste, Thomson settled on organisational categories that were to have a lasting effect on the research into this thirteenth-century thinker.13 Thomson presented six categories of works: Translations from the Greek; Commentaries (both biblical and philosophical); Philosophical and Scientific; Pastoral and Devotional; Miscellaneous;14 and, AngloNorman. These were followed by a survey of Grosseteste's sermons, letters, and Dicta. Thomson then concluded with arguments for works to be considered spurious or dubious, along with an outline of lost or untraced texts. It is difficult to envisage through the lenses of these categories a theological career. Even though Thomson allowed that Grosseteste was a regent master of theology for some twenty years and remained active in theology throughout his eighteen years as a bishop, our bibliographer did not consider the term 'theology' to be an adequate descriptor of Grosseteste's works. Instead, Thomson helped to create an image of Grosseteste as primarily a natural philosopher, who had interests in pastoral theology and language studies. There still remains, then, the challenge of understanding Grosseteste as theologian. More to

The Super Psalterium in Context / 33 the point, if we are intent on fully understanding the nature of Grosseteste's writings, then we ought to have some means by which we can relate his literary output to his theological commitments.15 My purpose in redescribing his theological writings is twofold. In the first place, I want to use it as the basis for evaluating current views on Grosseteste's place in the history of medieval theology.16 In order to make that assessment, it is vital that we establish a corpus of texts that represents all aspects of his theological work without privileging a single type, such as his biblical commentaries. A comprehensive account of his theological work provides the necessary context for those commentaries, and in particular his Super Psalterium - the text which I have been charged to edit.17 Hence, this paper will also address an additional concern, namely the nature of the Super Psalterium, and how it is part of Grosseteste's theological writings. Rehabilitating Grosseteste as a theologian is a daunting task, one which cannot be accomplished in a single article. The best starting point is an account of his writings while he was professionally involved in the theological enterprise, namely as a master of the sacred page at Oxford (ca. 1229-35).l8 This requires a strict historical approach, as Grosseteste's regency occurred in a period of robust debate concerning which topics belonged to the sacred science, and what issues were merely profane.19 The most sensible means of avoiding anachronistic or imprecise analysis of Grosseteste's theological writings is to connect his literary production with a historical description of theological education in the medieval university. Regardless of what was considered to be theological content by scholastic theologians, all were in agreement as to what kind of texts their institutional responsibilities demanded that they produce.20 Having established a reliable corpus of theological writings from Grosseteste's time in the schools, one can move on to include the theological writings from his episcopal period. The establishment of Grosseteste's theological corpus is a fundamental step, but only an initial one. In the second part of this paper, I will draw some concepts from two major literary theories in order to suggest how historians and text editors may engage the corpus in the process of editing one specific theological text. The literary concepts are intertextuality and mouvance, both of which challenge the modern reader to consider the relationship between textual construction and meaning. In employing these theories, my aim is not to trade historical evidence for literary theory; rather it is the opposite. I will suggest that these two theories provide methods by which a text editor may fully embrace an editorial aesthetic that is rigorously historical, and that aims to reflect not only the

34 / James R. Ginther manuscript transmission in terms of scribal practice, but also the nature of the text and its cultural function.21 Intertextuality and mouvance both provide the editor with some tools to fulfil that aim, and I shall use the example of editing the Super Psalterium to illustrate how historians and text editors can harvest useful and practical methods from these two literary theories. Master of the Sacred Page During the early thirteenth century, when Grosseteste was teaching in the schools, there was a concensus as to the activities of a master of theology. The sources point to a tripartite magisterial life: lecturing, disputing, and preaching.22 Each duty had a certain amount of literary activity connected to it.23 Using this tripartite description we can begin to reconstruct the category of theological writings from Grosseteste's corpus. A Lectio

To lecture was not to expound a particular theological theme or idea: that would be a collatio, which is more related to the act of preaching than it is to lecturing.24 Lecturing in a faculty of theology began and ended with an exposition of the central text of the discipline. In theology, this text was not the Sentences of Lombard, but rather the Bible. Hearing lectures on the Bible is where matriculated students began, and if they survived the lengthy period of study and could demonstrate the suitable acumen, it is where they would return as masters. Along the way they composed their own cursory lectures on the Bible, and then lectures on the Sentences, although it is not entirely clear when this became the norm.25 In the end, it was as master that the theologian acquired the responsibility and privilege to expound the sacred text fully, both literally and spiritually. Central to the master's lectio is the actual exegetical work, where he unlocks the theological mysteries of the sacred text. Exegetical work has survived in three forms. The most common form is commentary that has been refined and re-edited by the master himself. These texts are normally marked by an occasional excursus or extended analysis that does not reflect the rhythm of regular classroom contact. Moreover, some texts are so extensively restructured that they have taken on the attributes of a treatise, where the auditor becomes the lector. For Grosseteste, we have a number of sources that can be counted as magisterial

The Super Psalterium in Context / 35 publications, such as the Hexaemeron, his Galatians commentary, and the remains of his commentary on Ecclesiasticus.261 omit here, for the moment, the Super Psalterium, but we can say that a large part of this commentary appears to be a reworking of lectures. Grosseteste also appears to have recycled parts of three commentaries when he wrote the De cessatione legalium. In section two of that work, he takes his reader through three separate expositions of Old Testament texts, all of which demonstrate Christ's fulfilment of the Jewish Law. The first exposition is on Genesis 18, and may have been part of the original set of lectures on Genesis, which also spawned the Hexaemeron. The second is an extensive commentary on Isaiah 53, which is immediately followed by an exposition of Daniel 9.24~7.27 Each of these sections is a lemmatic analysis of the sacred text, which has been redeployed here in order to bolster Grosseteste's central argument. Like the exposition of Ecclesiasticus, no manuscripts of the complete commentaries have been discovered. Another type of text related to the lectio is the reportatio, where the lecture is recorded either by an attending student or an official secretary.28 For Grosseteste, we have no sources that bear any of the textual markers of a reported lecture. Related to the reportatio is a third form of textual remains of lectures: the preparatory notes. I would suggest that this could fall into two possible sub-categories: first, there are notes that act as glosses, as in the case of Grosseteste's glosses on the Pauline epistles, which have survived thanks mainly to the work of Thomas Gascoigne.29 However, we have another type of preparatory notes, and they are found within the manuscripts of Grosseteste's Super Psalterium. For example, in all the manuscripts of the commentary, Grosseteste's comments on Psalm 21.15are a mishmash of quotation and observation. The word that catches Grosseteste's attention here is aqua, and he begins with an extensive quotation from Hrabanus Maurus's De universe, where the carolingian scholar notes the multivalent signification of water in Scripture.30 Grosseteste then moves on to make some observations about the properties of water as it appears and functions in the natural world. The theological science here becomes the basis for making some rather detailed and complex tropological and allegorical arguments. At one point, as if aware of just how obscure he is becoming about the meaning for water, he notes: Tf someone should object, since [as the Psalmist says] "the water is dark in the clouds of the air" he will receive the response: "Nothing is said in sacred Scripture obscurely, which is not said openly elsewhere."'3' The weaving of scriptural language into his own scientific exposition is not surprising, nor even the use of Augustine's

36 / James R. Ginther famous dictum concerning spiritual exegesis; but what is eye-catching is the use of the future tense: if someone should object, Grosseteste will respond. This implies that this note has been jotted down in preparation for a lecture, where a possible question could be raised. B Disputatio The appearance of a quaestio in a lecture should not surprise us, for this kind of question-and-answer method remained part of lecturing into the fourteenth century. For this reason, we need at all times to distinguish between a question or objection, and the quaestio disputata. While the latter was in part the offspring of the former, they were not the same thing. Records of disputations from thirteenth-century Oxford are somewhat rare, and Grosseteste provides the sole literary evidence from Oxford for the period prior to 1240.32 In 1982, Joseph Goering published an edition of the De dotibus, demonstrating that this text was the record of Grosseteste's disputation on the marriage gifts from Christ to the Church.33 While Goering suggests that this is the only disputed question of Grosseteste's to survive, there is some evidence of other extant questions. The problem in identifying these works as disputed questions is that some appear to have been reworked in the format of a tractatus. Still, some of Grosseteste's shorter theological works retain some identifiable features of disputed questions. As Bernard Bazan has pointed out, disputed questions were the property of the master and not the disputants. While students were involved in the process, such as those who took the role of opponens and on occasion the respondens, the initial question was set by the master and it was he who produced the final resolution of the debate, the determinatio. By 1250, the process could produce two different kinds of texts: a record of the initial disputation, in which each participant's contribution was recorded, and the separate magisterial determination, in which the arguments for and against were recorded in light of the final solution to which the master had come. The latter type often retains some linguistic markers of the actual disputation. Questions began with markers such as queritur, utrum, an, etc.; arguments for and against were marked by sed contra, dicebatur quod, respondendum est, etc. A master would also provide his overall solution (solutio, respondeo quod, respondendum est, etc.), along with specific responses to the previous arguments against his solution (ad obiecta dico, respondeo ad obiecta, etc.).34 In this light, we may consider De veritate, De ordine emanandi causatarum a Deo, and De Hbero arbitrio to be determinations of disputed

The Super Psalterium in Context / 37 questions.35 The first work contains the largest number of textual markers from a disputed question, including a remark that one objection falls outside the question which Grosseteste is attempting to determine.36 The last work, in both its recensions, also has a number of markers of a disputed question, and in the second recension the text ends with a list of relevant questions, which Grosseteste omitted from the determination so as not to tax the patience of the reader.37 The second question (which also circulated under the title De aeternitate Filii in divinis) has the fewest markers, but the debate begins with Quod primo quaeritur, and the bulk of the work is Grosseteste's solution to the question.38 Callus suggested that De veritate propositionis and De scientia Dei should also be counted as records of disputed questions.39 However, these lack any of the textual markers listed above, and have the characteristics of dicta rather than quaestiones.40 The first of these is closely related to De veritate, and the second is linked to the subject matter of De libero arbitrio. From Goering's initial finding of one disputed question, scholars may now attribute four published determinations of disputations held by Grosseteste in the Franciscan convent.41 In addition to these texts, there is further evidence of robust disputation in Grosseteste's regency. In his commentary on Galatians 2, Grosseteste raises the age-old question as to whether St Peter had practiced a dissimulation when he kept the Jewish dietary laws, an act over which the Apostle Paul severely challenged him. Medieval commentators had a wealth of data from which to draw a resolution to this question, especially since Augustine and Jerome had proposed opposing views. Grosseteste briefly rehearses the debate and then concludes with the comment: 'But these questions will be best treated in disputing rather than in lecturing and expounding.'42 Once again, it is Grosseteste's use of the future tense that is instructive here: it is not just the fact that these issues belong more correctly to a disputation, but that it will be treated in this way. We may infer that Grosseteste had planned to dispute this very topic with his students; and while no written record of the disputation has survived, it is worth noting that this same issue occupies Grosseteste's attention in the fourth section of the De cessatione legalium.^ Our inference is strengthened by the fact that Grosseteste's exposition on Galatians did spawn additional thoughts about the relationship between the Jewish Law and Christian practice, and James McEvoy has carefully demonstrated the close relationship between the Galatians commentary and the De cessatione legalium.44 The relationship between these two texts, however, unfolded through the act of disputation. The first part of the treatise bears the textual markers of a disputed question:

38 / James R. Ginther a major question is raised (how can the mandate to keep the Sabbath be described as a sempiternal pact, if it has already been voided by the New Law?), which then leads to further questions about the efficacy and role of the Mosaic Law in Christian theology. Grosseteste reviews a number of possible solutions and related objections, until he provides his own determination on the main question. As the structure and rhetoric of this section mirrors that of other published determinations from the period, it would seem appropriate to conclude that Grosseteste also disputed this same question in his school.45 Grosseteste himself mentions that disputations were held in the Franciscan school, and they could lead to some impolite behaviour on the part of the students.46 That behavior notwithstanding, disputing was an essential component of Franciscan education, so Thomas of Eccleston states. In his chronicle, he notes that after Grosseteste was appointed as lector, the convent 'in such a brief time made inestimable progress in subtle questions and moralities, which are congruent to preaching. '47 For Thomas, the ability to lead disputations was a mark of a master, and he attaches significance to disputation because it was excellent preparation for preaching. The chewing over of Christian doctrine, to use the image proffered by Peter the Chanter, provided students with the opportunity to appropriate scriptural teaching in such a manner that they could then later communicate the truths to another audience. In addition, experience in disputing gave the student the method whereby he could adequately confound the teaching of heretics. For the Franciscans, the exercise of disputation spoke directly to the raison d'etre of their order, or at least as they had come to see it.48 C Praedicatio

Grosseteste fulfilled all the magisterial functions, moving from lecture to disputation, and finally to preaching. It is Grosseteste again who provides the bulk of evidence of university preaching at Oxford before 1235. At least one university sermon of Robert of Bingham has also survived, found among the Oxford sermons of Jordan of Saxony, but the rest of the literary evidence comes from Grosseteste.49 Twenty-five of Grosseteste's Dicta appear to be sermons, some of which were preached outside of the university environment - although it now appears that some of these sermons may be from his episcopal period.50 There is also the set of sermons attributed to Grosseteste in Durham, Dean and Chapter Library MS A.III.12.51 Grosseteste's sermons are in desperate need of some scholarly attention. We have benefited a great deal from

The Super Psalterium in Context / 39 the excellent editions produced by Servus Gieben and James McEvoy.52 However, the collections really require a much more strategic and wholistic approach. We need to develop some sense of the transmission, in order to determine why these collections were developed and organised. There will be great benefit in studying Grosseteste's sermons from his regency. The sermon he preached at his inception as a master of theology provides a clear example of the importance of these sources. Most assessments of Grosseteste's biblical exegesis have focused on his interest in moral and allegorical readings of the sacred page; however, his inception sermon provides a corrective to this view, since it also reveals Grosseteste's concern with literal exegesis that fully exploits the resources of the liberal arts.53 Further study of other sermons from his regency should produce similar results, and this potential ought to act as a stimulus for pursuing editions of his sermon collections, as well as the Dicta.54 D Resources for Theology, Extended Arguments, and Pastoralia With Grosseteste's pedagogical responsibilites as the focal point of identifying his theological works, scholars are in a much better position to add other texts to the corpus. These texts can be considered theological inasmuch as they relate to the central tasks of teaching theology. For example, the Dicta which are not classed as sermons are in fact research notes and reflections on theological points that Grosseteste wrote down as he prepared for his lectures and sermons.55 His tabula of patristic and scriptural sources organised under a variety of theological headings also acted as a resource for his theological work.56 Other texts were extensions of his teaching. As already noted, the De cessatione legalium is a prime example: the first section originated as a disputed question; the next section is a conflation of excerpts from three separate biblical commentaries. Grosseteste then investigates the related christological and ecclesiological arguments in section three. Finally, he concludes by summarising his own views on the dissimulation of Peter and the views of Augustine and Jerome on this very matter. Hence, nearly all of this treatise originated from his central task of teaching theology at Oxford. Grosseteste's theological works not only contributed to the development of his students, but also looked beyond the schools of theology. Of all the works on confession and the pastoral care penned by Grosseteste, most are written for a non-academic audience. Instead, he had parish clergy, monks, and members of his own episcopal household in mind,

40 / James R. Ginther to mention three prominent examples.57 These texts clearly betray a sophisticated grasp of the theological facets of the pastoral care, not to mention an excellent understanding of contemporary philosophical psychology. Yet, it is open to question whether these belong to the category of theological works proper, or instead should inhabit their own genre, whose name was given by Leonard Boyle as pastoralia.5* One of the distinctive features of pastoralia is that these types of texts can rely heavily on canon law in their formation, and for that reason are driven more by practical problems and issues, rather than by strictly theological concerns. Hence, they should be accorded their own genre, distinct from theological texts. It is at this point that a genre model can fall apart, and there is no need to force the issue. Instead, it is more than reasonable to suggest that these two categories of medieval texts intersected. Pastoral works often have an altogether different audience in mind than do lectures on Scripture, disputed questions and university sermons, and this required a different form of rhetoric and a different strategy for textual organisation. However, they also share common sources and interests. For one thing, scholastic theologians also saw the theological force of canon law and had no reticence in exploiting the law to advance a theological argument. Secondly, any theoretical discussion of sacramental theology was shaped by the practical demands of the sacramental system, and so this area of theological discourse often treated major issues related to the pastoral care. The only point of clarification we ought to make is that there is no evidence of 'courses' on pastoral theology in the medieval university. The subject was certainly broached in exegesis and disputation, and most assuredly in sermons, but pastoral works must be seen as the indirect result of theological work in the medieval university. Context and Intertextuality I have spent the bulk of this paper describing Grosseteste's theological writings not only because to date no one has attempted to do so in a comprehensive manner, but more importantly because doing so provides a context for executing a critical edition of the Super Psalterium. Most editions of commentaries look to the commentary tradition as the main context.59 While this is an extremely useful methodology, it imposes certain limitations on how the editor perceives the nature of the text, and how it can be related to other texts of the medieval period. Moreover, it assumes that the medieval method of exegesis was generic, and that commenting on the writings of Aristotle, for example, was akin

The Super Psalterium in Context / 41 to expounding the Bible. Again, this is partially true, as biblical exegesis inherited the pedagogical focus of the philosophical commentary tradition. However, the temptation for editors and historians has been to perceive biblical exegesis as a separate methodology from 'theologising/ since it appears to have a different set of priorities and aims from disputations, treatises, and theological summae. Many have given into this temptation, and it has yielded a somewhat distorted conception of the aims of scholastic theologians as exegetes. It is at this point that intertextuality can provide a means of correcting this view. Briefly, intertextuality suggests that all texts are composed of other texts, either implicitly or explicity. To a large extent, writing is reduced to 'text processing/ that is, an author does not create a text ex nihilo, but rather exploits other texts as the building blocks for his new textual creation. Furthermore, the heralds of intertextuality employ a rather elastic notion of 'text/ in that it is not only a composition of words on parchment or paper, but also the product of a specific cultural or institutional context, or the contours of human and non-human geography. Hence, in constructing the meaning of text, we must look to the texts themselves, as well as those fascinating gaps between the texts. It is one way in which the author may fade to the background, reduced as it were to a processing unit. Authorial genius is a mere illusion, and the real textual brilliance lies well beyond the individual.60 For many editors and historians of medieval theological texts, the attempt to limit, or remove entirely, authorial intent is a major stumbling block. Equally problematic is the assertion that one cannot establish any valid frame of reference for a historical exposition, since every text is part of a number of textual networks, and thus no one network can claim priority over another. We are left then with texts whose meaning can be ascertained mainly in terms of how any subsequent reader chooses to frame his or her reading. Contextualisation, a basic methodology in the historical study of texts, is therefore unfounded. In attempting to inject an editorial methodology with intertextual concepts, my intention is not to embrace the project of intertextuality as a whole, but to benefit from its observations on textual production without necessarily acquiescing to the post-modern ontology and epistemologies that intertextuality means to exemplify.61 In the first place, I have no desire to eliminate Grosseteste as author: killing off the author solves very little, if only because medieval theologians were doing everything they could to breathe life into the author.62 Secondly, historians must always establish a frame of reference if only to render an intelligible narrative, be it based on chronological, geographic, or cul-

42 / James R. Ginther tural relationships. Editors of medieval theological texts should therefore consider intertextual relationships that can be supported by chronological sequence, opportunities of interpersonal contact, or access by the author in question to a selection of texts in a given geographic area. There is little point in positing a relationship between texts, if one cannot establish the context in which that intertextual relationship could develop. Moreover, a text must be related to the cultural context in which it is produced. At the very least, intertextuality challenges the editor to establish his text against a horizon of other texts, be they composed of words on parchment, or texts that are defined as 'culture' or 'tradition.' In this way, Grosseteste's Super PsaUerium can not only be conceived as a text belonging to the medieval commentary tradition, but since it is a reflection of his teaching in a faculty of theology, it must also be considered in light of the various texts and contexts of which medieval scholastic theology is composed. Intertextuality forces us to consider the function of the Super PsaUerium within the broader framework of medieval theology. How it was copied and circulated, and indeed for what reason, must in some way resonate in its modern edition. The task of editing this commentary must then fulfil two mandates. It should first reflect the relationship between the commentary and other texts within the Grosseteste corpus, as well as the texts that Grosseteste had at his disposal. Second, it should reflect the relationship between the commentary and the general production of texts in medieval scholastic theology. The first mandate becomes increasingly important when we realise that Grosseteste himself embodies the very concept of re-creating texts with other texts. As a 'text processor,' he re-deployed portions of texts as he wrote. Grosseteste's De cessatione legalium has already provided a clear example of this replicative tendency, but there are other texts that also demonstrate the same. I first noticed intertextual relationships when editing Grosseteste's inception sermon, which is now Dictum 19. In describing the broad canvas on which a theologian practices spiritual exegesis, he makes reference to Ps. 76. Not only do his comments in Dictum 19 become crystal clear after reading his comments on this Psalm, there is some actual repetition of words and phrases from the commentary in the Dictum.63 A more explicit example is found in a small text, which its copyist has entitled De humilitate contemplativorum. Servus Gieben was the first to note that this text is in fact a conflation of two sources, namely the Super PsaUerium and sermon 8, the latter of which appears to have been a collation given before the Franciscan convent.64 Gieben's assessment is

The Super Psalterium in Context / 43 in need of a slight but important correction. The sources he noted do indeed contain the sections that make up the De humilitate contemplativorum. He relied, however, upon a printed version of the sermon.65 This version, a transcription of the sermon in London, British Library MS Royal 6.E.V, is in fact only one version of the sermon, and other manuscripts actually contain the sections that Gieben thought came only from the Psalms commentary.66 Hence, we can provisionally conclude that De humilitate contemplativorum is an excerpt of sermon 8, but that is only part of the story. The portion that also finds its way into the Psalms commentary,67 which concerns the major signs of humility, is also found in one other Dictum, and informs the discussion of two others.68 This suggests a different textual relationship between these various sources, one that is far more complex than Gieben had first suggested. Instances such as this require the editors of the Psalms commentary to remain alert at all times for the possibility of textual replication. This is the most practical facet of intertextuality, since it will allow us to trace the textual relationships between the Psalms commentary and the other theological writings of Grosseteste. Principles of Editing the Super Psalterium Casting our eye on the broader landscape of scholastic theological writings produces a further opportunity for the forthcoming critical edition. The Super Psalterium presents a unique challenge for the editors. In some respects, it is an ideal text to edit: only six manuscripts, and of those only three are complete (BEVa).69 Equally important is the fact that one manuscript was completed within Grosseteste's lifetime (D), and a second just a few years after his death (V}. However, this ideal situation quickly breaks down when the contents are examined. To begin with, the manuscripts present three different ways of ordering the text, at least for the earlier sections of the commentary; once we reach the comments on Ps. 65, the text becomes relatively stable.70 Even more challenging is the fact that it is not always clear that the notes present are in fact related to the exegesis of the Psalms. Some notes are comments on other books of the Bible, and others are sermons. One can try to develop a method of filtering out this extraneous material, and even developing a means of ordering the text lemmatically.71 However, problems persist. For example, if we include notes that only have a lemma drawn from the first one hundred Psalms, we have no idea whether the note was actually connected to Grosseteste's exposition, or if a scribe placed it there as a means of making sense of his own exemplar.

44 / James R. Ginther With all these problems, we are forced to conclude that the text, as it has survived, does not conform to any standard of the scholastic lectio. It cannot therefore represent what Grosseteste actually completed within his school, nor in light of his other re-edited commentaries does it represent his own reworking of the material. Instead, we are left with a text that has been manhandled by at least three editors, and so these witnesses reflect not only Grosseteste's theological ideas, but also the interests and needs of later editors and readers.72 The classical model of editing would have us remove this haze of later interpolations and arrangements, so as to discover the content of an autograph or at least the apograph. In light of intertextuality, and the dim chance of ever meeting those demands of classical editing, I propose that we should rather focus on the haze. If it is important to gaze upon the context of Grosseteste's theological disposition as we edit, it may also be useful to keep another eye on the context of the manuscript witnesses, especially if we have no idea what the original text looked like. Hence, we can envisage the Super Psalterium both as some representative form of Grosseteste's exegesis, and as a resource for theological work. It is at this point that the concept of mouvance comes into play. Inspired by intertextual theory, and developed as a means to explain the huge variations among French troubador sources, this theory suggested that a poetic text was subject to change according to the contemporary performance. Hence the value of the text was not discovered by tracing it back to the original construction; instead, one could see the value of each instance of its movement as the text shifted in structure and content. One instance was hardly more important than the other since each text was a witness to the way the song was employed within a specific historical and cultural context.73 More recently, this concepthas been applied to the challenge of re-editing iheAncrene Wisse, since there is substantial variation in the many manuscript witnesses. The validity of employing a concept which originally explained the performative differences of poetry and song is based on the assumption that all texts are performative to some degree. Either the text reflects a specific historical performance, such as the way in which a text demands that it be performed (that is read or recited) within a given context, or provides the raw data for a future performance, such as rules for solitary or communal living that include some use of that text in that particular modus vivendi. Bella Millett has recently argued that the attempt to trace the manuscripts to the 'original' textual construction of the Ancrene Wisse would suppress an invaluable amount of data about the Rule as a performative text.74

The Super Psalterium in Context / 45 Following a mouvance methodology in editing is by no means an easier task than the classical form of editing. Representing the complexity of the text's movement is something that still eludes editors who produce printed editions. As Millett argues, relegating the text's movements to an apparatus at the foot of the page simply denies the reader any real opportunity to appreciate the dynamics of the text's mouvance.75 The alternative is to employ a hypertextual approach in the editing. We are quite close to making this a practical reality - especially for web-based editions - but there remains the greatest challenge of convincing publishers that such a strategy is profitable. Until then, an edition that encapsulates a mouvance methodology must be content with supplying a snapshot of one, perhaps two, instances of the text's historical and geographical movement. As a result, the future edition of the Super Psalterium ought to reflect the text's structure and the organisation of its earliest complete form. To date, the best witness for this is manuscript B. If we take its colophon seriously, it originated from an Oxford exemplar, and hence can make a claim for some authority.76 Moreover, its scribe was far more conversant in Latin than his counterpart for manuscript E. I should say that this is highly provisional since we still need to have a look at manuscript Va, and this may not be possible for some time.77 Even if it were different and presented a fourth means of ordering the text and if it could be validated as more authoritative than manuscript B, it still would not mean that we have necessarily discovered a path to the original construction of the text. The mouvance edition would maintain an essential connection with the fundamental features of Grosseteste's theological thought in two ways: his authorship of any portion of the commentary remains intact, and the apparatus fontium will relate the commentary to the other works of Grosseteste's theological corpus. Its thirteenth-century character would not be lost. At the same time, the editors would be able to represent how the commentary was perceived as a form of theological writing, and as a resource for later theological thought. The immediate result is that we need not worry about which note was original to the commentary, and which was added. Instead, we would present the text as is, in the way its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century readers received it. All the Dicta found in the Bologna manuscript would be retained, as would the two versions of the comments on Psalms 80 and 81, not to mention the fragment of Grosseteste's confessional treatise, Quoniam cogitacio - even though this text hails from his episcopal period.78

46 / James R. Ginther There is one further way in which Grosseteste's authorial intentions can be maintained in a mouvance edition of the commentary. In creating an apparatus fontium most editors point the reader to the critical edition of the source employed. This is an entirely valid procedure, since it draws the reader towards the most accurate rendering of the sources. However, an unintended result is that the historical development of texts, especially patristic sources, is lost. Instead, if we take the idea of mouvance to its logical conclusion, it would be more appropriate to trace sources to the material rather than the formal source. This is a tremendous challenge, and in some instances it may not be possible; and yet, it would further our understanding of the intertextuality of Grosseteste's exegesis of the Psalms. This does not necessarily mean that we must trace all citations to specific manuscripts, although in the case of Grosseteste's use of Augustine's De civitate Dei and Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job, this is an immediate possibility.79 For most sources, however, we simply need to identify a generic material source. For example, in tracing some of the sources in the commentary, it has become clear that Grosseteste's citation of Augustine does not come from a manuscript of Augustine's works, but rather from a manuscript of Gratian's Decretum. This speaks volumes about how Grosseteste encountered his sources, and this can have an impact on how we will eventually come to understand the content of the source he was employing to explicate the biblical text. Clearly, a mouvance edition does not reduce the labour of the editorial task; rather, it can increase it tenfold. Nonetheless, at the end of the day we can produce a critical edition that reflects the historical movement of the commentary. Conclusion In one of his last public addresses, Grosseteste summarised his long career with a simple statement: 'First I was a cleric, then a master of theology and a priest, and then finally a bishop/80 His summary may appear at odds with how the modern study of Grosseteste's life and works has unfolded: while he was a cleric he also was engaged in philosophical study and wrote a number of important texts on philosophy and the natural world. As bishop, he continued in this study, not to mention the pastoral concerns on which his priestly responsibilities had focused his attention. However, the middle period - as master of theology - has remained undeveloped in the literature, and yet Grosseteste considered it to be an important feature of his life, even though it lasted only for a short time. For him, the significance of his

The Super Psalterium in Context / 47 scholarly life was the fact that he was a theologian and not a philosopher. Establishing the category of his theological writings is the fundamental step for examining this major stage of Grosseteste's life. His writings were a product of his institutional responsibilities, arising from his lecturing, disputing, and preaching. His theological teaching did not diminish his desire to contribute to the literature of pastoral care, but instead infused it with greater energy and importance. Moreover, with a clearer understanding of Grosseteste's theological writings, we have established a solid context for the future editing of his theological texts. The forthcoming edition of the Super Psalterium will be an important contribution to the modern study of the life and works of Robert Grosseteste. It will provide a textual window onto his theological vision, as it will be treated as theological text and thus will demonstrate the textual relationships between his exegesis and his other theological work. Furthermore, in adopting a mouvance methodology in the editing, the edition will present the commentary as part of the genre of theological literature of medieval scholastic theology. All this will further our understanding of the life and works of Grosseteste, and his place in the history of medieval thought.

48 / James R. Ginther Appendix i: Grosseteste's Theological Works while Master of the Sacred Page, Oxford (ca. 1229/30-1235) Lectio: Lectures on Scripture Original Lectures

'Published' Form

Related Texts

Lectures on the Psalms Lectures on Galatians

Super Psalterium* Super epistolas s. Pauli ad Galatas Glossa super epistolas s, Pauli De operationibus solis

De penitencia David*

Hexaemeron

De cessatione legalium, 2.1-3 De cessatione legalium, 2.4-6 De cessatione legalium, 2.7-8

Lectures on the Pauline Epistles Lectures on Ecclesiasticus Lectures on Genesis Lectures of Isaiah Lectures on Daniel

Disputatio: Disputed Questions Original Form

'Published' Form

Related Texts

disputed question on truth disputed question on christology disputed questions on free will disputed question on the marriage gifts disputed questions on the efficacy of the Mosaic Law disputed question on the dissimulation of Peter

De veritate

De veritate propositionis

De ordine emanandi causatarum a Deo De libero arbitrio (recensions i & 2*) De dotibus

De statu causarum, De potentia et actu De scientia Dei

De cessatione legalium, 1.1-11 [announced in Super epistolas s. Pauli ad Galatas, z]

De cessatione legalium, 4.3-8

The Super Psalterium in Context / 49 Praedicatio: Sermons 1 Sermons in the Dicta collection* 2 Sermons in Durham MS A.III. 12* 3 Sermons in other collections (datable to the magisterial period)*

Collatio: Conferences 1 Sermon 6* 2 Tractatus de scala paupertatis* (= Sermon 8) ** De humilitate contemplativorum* 3 [Collation on Jerome's prefatory letter for the Bible] -> Prooemium to the Hexaemeron

Theological Resources 1 Tabula distinctionum 2 Dicta (non-sermons)*

Fastoralia (datable to the regency period) 1 Perambulavit ludas (-De confessione III) 2 De decem mandatis *=» Sermon 83*, Versus de decem mandatis*

(* = unedited)

5O / James R. Ginther Appendix 2: The Manuscripts of the Super Psalterium Bologna, Biblioteca dell'Archiginnasio MS A.9&3 (=B) is an early fourteenthcentury manuscript which was produced at a Dominican community in England.1 This one of three witnesses which contain the comments on Psalms i to too. This manuscript is the only one examined so far that contains a medieval title to the work (fol. ira). Its colophon states that the manuscript was copied from an exemplar that resided in an Oxford library. Durham, Dean and Chapter Library MS A.III.12 (=D) is a composite of at least five different English manuscripts dating from the first half of the thirteenth century. It contains only selected portions of the commentary, and does not include the comments on the later psalms.2 Eton College MS 8 (=£) is a fifteenth-century English manuscript, and the second manuscript containing the full commentary. It was deposited at Eton College by 1600, but nothing is known of its medieval provenance.3 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS e Museo 15 (=O) is a glossed Psalter from the early thirteenth century, and contains only the prologue. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Ottob. lat. 185 (=V) is a mid-thirteenth century, English manuscript which arrived in Italy sometime in the sixteenth century.4 The commentary follows a copy of Bonaventure's commentary on book 4 of the Sentences, and a set of theological questions. This MS has codicological elements that are normally found in manuscripts copied in Parisian scriptoria. Either it was executed at Paris by an English scribe; or it was written in England, and the scribe duplicated his Parisian exemplar. Like D, it contains only the earlier parts of the commentary - although in a different order - and has more psalms lemmata attached to the notes. It breaks off in midsentence.

1 Albano Sorbelli, Inventari dei manoscritti delle Biblioteche d'ltalia. Opera fondata dal Prof. Giuseppe Mazzatinti. XXXII: Bologna (Florence: Olschki, 1925), pp. 123-4. 2 The catalogue for the Dean and Chapter Library was completed by one of its librarians in 1725: Thomas Rud, Codicum manuscriptorum ecdesiae cathedralis Dunelmensis catalogue classicus (Durham: Payne and Foss, 1825), 29-37. 3 A complete description may be found in N. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 2.636-7. 4 N.R. Ker, "Cardinal Cervini's Manuscripts from the Cambridge Friars," in Xenia medii aevi historiam illustrantia oblata Thomae Kaeppeli, O.P., ed. P. Kunzle and R. Creyton, 2 vols., Storia e letteratura, 141-2 (Rome: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1978), 1.51-71. There is no modern catalogue for the Latin Ottobonian manuscripts.

The Super Psalterium in Context / 51 Valencia, Archive catedral MS in (=Va) is a mid-fifteenth English manuscript that was donated to the cathedral library by Vincent Clement.5 Clement had studied theology at Oxford under the tutelage of Thomas Gascoigne, and had a very successful ecclesiastical career which included a number of prebendaries in English cathedral chapters as well as at the cathedral of Valencia.6 The modern cataloguer attributed this commentary to the Venerable Bede, but given the manuscript's provenance and the incipits and explicit, it is in fact another copy of Grosseteste's Super Psalterium. The colophon indicates that the manuscript was completed at Oxford on 10 October 14467 This manuscript still awaits critical examination.8

5 See The Friars Library, ed. K.W. Humphreys, Corpus of British medieval library catalogues, i (London: British Academy, 1990), 227. 6 A.B. Emden, Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952-7), 1.432-3. 7 D. Elias Olmos y Canalda, Codices de la Catedral de Valencia, second edition (Valencia: n.p., 1961), 88-9. 8 A request for a microfilm of this mansucript was placed with the CNRS (Fonds latines), Paris in 1998. In a recent email communication, dated 6 March 2001, Nathalie Picque informed me that the Valencia repository remains closed until further notice.

52 / James R. Ginther NOTES 1 See the seminal essays in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. Daniel A. Callus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). 2 Most of Grosseteste's philosophical and 'scientific' works are printed in Baur, Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln (Miinster i. W.: Aschendorf, 1912). An electronic version of these texts is available at http://www.grosseteste.com/. 3 James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 4 Christopher R. Cheney, Episcopal Visitations of Monasteries in the Thirteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931). Grosseteste presented his vision of monastic visitation in a sermon preached before a monastic chapter sometime during his episcopacy: James R. Ginther, 'Monastic Ideals and Episcopal Visitations: The Sermo ad religiosos of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1235-1253),' in C.A. Meussig, ed., Medieval Monastic Preaching, (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 231-53. 5 See for example, Roberti Grosseteste quondam episcopi Lincolniensis Epistolae, ed. Henry R. Luard, Rolls Series, 25 (London: Longman, 1861), nos 17 (pp. 63-5), 19 (68-9), 52 (151-4), 72 (203-4), and 124 (348-51). An electronic version of these letters is available at http:// www.grosseteste.com/. 6 The statutes are printed in Councils and Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, ed. Frederick M. Powicke and Christopher R. Cheney, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2.265-78; see also Grosseteste's letter collection Epistolae, 154-66. 7 Servus Gieben, 'Robert Grosseteste at the Papal Curia, Lyons, 1250: Edition of the Documents,' Collectanea Franciscana 41 (1971), 340-93. See also Joseph Goering, 'Robert Grosseteste at the Papal Curia,' in Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman, eds., A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 253-76. 8 Robert Grosseteste, Templum Dei, ed. Joseph Goering and Frank A.C. Mantello, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, 14 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 8; see also Leonard E. Boyle, 'Robert Grosseteste and the Pastoral Care,' Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8 (1979), 3-51; rprt. in Boyle, Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law (Aldershot: Variorum, 1981). 9 Joseph Goering, 'When and Where did Grosseteste Study Theology?' in McEvoy, ed., Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives on His Thought and Scholarship, Instrumenta Patristica 27 (Steenbrugge: St Peter's, 1995), 17-52, at 29-36.

The Super Psalterium in Context / 53 10 Beryl Smalley, The Biblical Scholar/ in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, 70-97. McEvoy recognised this important facet by suggesting another binary descriptor of Grosseteste's life in a reprint of some of his articles: James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, Exegete and Philosopher (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995). 11 Daniel A. Callus, 'The Date of Grosseteste's Translations and Commentaries of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Nicomachean Ethics,' Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 14 (1947), 186-209; Marinus de Jonge, 'Robert Grosseteste and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs/ Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 42 (1991), 115-25. 12 Frederick M. Powicke, Robert Grosseteste and the Nicomachean Ethics, Proceedings of the British Academy, 16 (London: British Academy, 1930). 13 S. Harrison Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1235-1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), i. 14 The first of these is an etymological treatise, surviving in a single manuscript. The four remaining works treat various aspects of social life in the thirteenth century, ranging from proper etiquette to the care of an estate: Thomson, Writings, 148-51. 15 One of the major tasks of the Electronic Grosseteste project is to reproduce an electronic version of Thomson's bibliographic study (with the kind permission of Cambridge University Press). This electronic tool will allow users to browse the list of Grosseteste's works using either Thomson's original categories, or a new set of categories that includes theology. For further details see the project's web site: http: / / www. grosseteste. com /. 16 I am currently completing a study entitled Master of the Sacred Page: A Study of the Theology of Robert Grosseteste, ca. 1229-1235, for Ashgate Press. 17 I am in fact a member of an editorial team, composed of Joseph Goering, Elizabeth Streitz-Guez, and myself. 18 A consensus has yet to be established in Grosseteste scholarship concerning the dates of his regency. I take the view that it began around the time he was appointed as lector to the Franciscan convent at Oxford, ca. 1229, and not earlier as others have suggested: James R. Ginther, 'Natural Philosophy and Theology at Oxford in the Early Thirteenth Century. An Edition and Study of Robert Grosseteste's Inception Sermon/ Medieval Sermon Studies 44 (2000), 108-34, at 111-1519 See Marie-Dominique Chenu, La theologie comme une science au XHIe siecle, 3d edition (Paris: Vrin, 1957); the record of sermons preached, ca. 1229-31 at Paris in Marie-Madeleine Davy, Les sermons universitaires parisiens de 1230-1231, Etudes de philosophic medievale 15 (Paris: Vrin,

54 / James R. Ginther

20

21 22

23 24

1931); and Martin Grabmann, Idivieti ecclesiastic! de Aristotele sotto Innocenzo III e Gregorio IX, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae 5 (Rome: Saler, 1941). I differ slightly from the traditional account of theological texts, which often focuses on those produced by students of theology, rather than masters. Hence, the traditional account places a great deal of importance on the Sentence commentaries. My aim is not to diminish the theological significance of these texts; rather, since they were not the responsibility of masters (and not the responsibility of students until after 1240), it is unnecessary to make any claims concerning the presence or absence of such a commentary (or any equivalent) in Grosseteste's theological corpus. See James Thorpe, Principles of Textual Criticism (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1972), 3-49. The first person to articulate this threefold task of a master was Peter the Chanter in his Verbum abbreviatum, c.i (PL 205.25). The evidence that this description remained in force even beyond Grosseteste's mastership is found in Thomas Aquinas's inaugural lecture in 1257, where he speaks of the three duties of a master of the sacred page. The sermons are printed in Thomas Aquinas, Opuscula theologica, ed. R.A. Verardo et al., 2 vols. (Turin: Marietta, 1954), i. 441-3- They are translated in Simon Tugwell, Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 355-60. Using this tripartite description to examine Grosseteste's writings is hardly novel, as Daniel Callus employed this threefold function of masters in his study of Grosseteste's intellectual career: Daniel A. Callus, 'Robert Grosseteste as Scholar,' in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, 1-70, at 28-32. See also Callus, The Oxford Career of Robert Grosseteste,' Oxoniensia 10 (1945), 45-72. For a different view of Grosseteste's theology, see Southern, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 205-32. See Appendix i for a listing of all works discussed in this section. Olga Weijers, Terminologie des universites au XHIe siecle, Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, 39 (Rome: Edizioni dell' Ateneo, 1987), 372-8; Bert Roest, A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1210-1517), Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 135. At least three collations can be attributed to Grosseteste. The first is now designated as Sermon 6, which begins with a recounting of collations in the early church: London, British Library MS Royal 6.E.V, fol. 8ira-vb; Thomson, Writings, 168. The second is a lecture given before the Franciscan convent, sometimes called De scala paupertatis (Sermon 8): Thomson, Writings, 168-9. The third has been edited as the Prooemium to the

The Super Psalterium in Context / 55

25

26

27

28

29 30

31

32

Hexaemeron, since it focuses on Jerome's prefatory letter to the Bible. If this was an evening collation, it may explain why at one point, Grosseteste supplements his analysis propter simpliciores. This may point to the fact that Grosseteste's audience was the whole convent, and not just those friars who were students in his school: Robert Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, ed. R.C. Dales and S. Gieben, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 6 (London: British Academy, 1982), prooem.112, p. 41. It would appear that it was during the 12405 at Paris that bachelors began to lecture on the Sentences as part of their coursework, at least fifteen years after Alexander of Hales presented his own gloss on the text to his theological school, and at least ten years after Hugh of StCher had penned his Scriptum super Sententias. M.-D. Chenu, 'Maitres et bacheliers de 1'universite de Paris, v. 1240,' Etudes d'histoire litteraire et doctrinale du XHIe siecle i (1932), 11-39; P- Glorieux, 'Les annees 12421247 a la faculte de theologie de Paris,' Recherches de theologie andenne et medievale 29 (1962), 234-49. Robert Grosseteste, Hexaemeron; idem, Expositio in epistolam sancti Pauli ad Galatas, ed. J. McEvoy, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 130 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995); Glossae in Epistolas Sancti Pauli, ed. R.C. Dales, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 130 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995); Tabula, ed. P.W. Rosemann, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 130 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995); James McEvoy, 'The Sun as res and signum: Grosseteste's Commentary on Ecclesiasticus ch. 43, vv. 1-5,' Recherches de theologie andenne et medievale 41 (1974), 38-91. Robert Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, ed. R.C. Dales and E.B. King, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 7 (London: The British Academy, 1986), 2.1-8 (pp. 76-115); McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, 97. Weijers, Terminologie, 361-5; Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), 200-8. See note 26. See Elizabeth M. Streitz, 'Robert Grosseteste: Commentarius in Psalmos I-XXXVI/ unpublished PhD diss. (University of Southern California, 1996), 276-8. Cf. Hrabanus Maurus, De universo, 11.1 (PL 111.309-11). Streitz, 'Commentarius in Psalmos,' 284: 'Si autem obiciatur, quoniam tenebrosa aqua in nubibus aeris, respondebitur: quoniam nichil dicitur in scriptura sancta obscure quod alicubi in eadem non dicatur aperte.' On the disputed questions from Richard Fishacre's regency (ca. 1243-8), see R. James Long, 'Richard Fishacre's Quaestio on the Ascension of Christ: An Edition,' Mediaeval Studies 40 (1978), 30-55; Long, 'Richard

56 / James R. Ginther

33 34

35

36

37 38 39 40 41

Fishacre's Super S. Augustini librum de haeresibus adnotationes: An Edition and Commentary/ Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum 60 (1993): 207-79. Joseph Goering, 'The De dotibus of Robert Grosseteste/ Mediaeval Studies 44 (1982), 83-109. Bernardo C. Bazan, 'Les questions disputees, principalement dans la faculte de theologie/ in Les questions disputees et les questions quodlibetiques dans lesfacultes de theologie, de droit, et de medecine, Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age Occidental, 44-5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 58-70,129-36. All these are edited in Baur, Philosophischen Werke, 130-43,147-274. The first recension of Delibero arbitrio has been critically edited by Neil Lewis, The First Recension of Robert Grosseteste's De Libero arbitrio/ Mediaeval Studies 53 (1991), 1-88. An abbreviated copy of the second recension exists in Durham Cathedral, Dean and Chapter Library, MS A.III.12, fols. 55va~57b. This is the earliest copy. Baur, Philosophischen Werke, 136: 'Et quia ad praesans non occurit auctoritas, quae istud determinet, interim differatur a nobis huius solutio.' Ibid., 240-1 (second recension). Neil Lewis is currently preparing a critical edition of the second recension. Ibid., 147-50. Callus, 'Robert Grosseteste as Scholar,' in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, 29. Baur, Philosophischen Werke, 143-7. In light of the description of disputed questions, De anima is a problematic text. If a question belonged to the master, then this text reflects more the work of Philip the Chancellor than that of Grosseteste. It may be possible to connect Grosseteste to the question, if he had been in Paris to witness the disputation, but this by no means provides any further light on the theological writings of Grosseteste himself. Baur printed the text as a dubium: ibid., 242-74. For a discussion of the text's authenticity and its relationship to the writings of Philip the Chancellor, see S. Harrison Thomson, 'The De anima of Robert Grosseteste/ New Scholasticism 7 (1933): 201-21; L.W. Keeler, 'The Dependence of Robert Grosseteste's De anima on the Summa of Philip the Chancellor/ New Scholasticism 11 (1937), 197-219; Daniel A. Callus, 'Philip the Chancellor and the De Anima Ascribed to Robert Grosseteste/ Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies i (1941): 105-27; Callus, 'The Summa Duacensis and the Pseudo-Grosseteste's De Anima,' Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 13 (1946): 225-9; and Efrem Bettoni, 'Intorno all'autenticita del De anima attribuito a Roberto Grossatesta/ Pier Lombardo 5 (1961), 3-27.

The Super Psalterium in Context / 57 42 Grosseteste, Expositio in epistolam ad Galatas, ed. McEvoy, 2.19 (p. 62). 43 Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, ed. Dales and King, 4.3-8 (164-99). 44 James McEvoy, 'Robert Grosseteste on the Ten Commandments,' Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 58 (1991): 167-205. 45 Grosseteste, De cessatione legalium, ed. Dales and King, 1.1-11 (7-75). 46 Dictum 128 (MS Royal 6.E.V, fol. 6ova): 'Hec enim voluntas expleri non potest nisi per verba vel alia signa bonum alterius inuertencia vel diminuencia: diminuere vel invertere bonum unius in alterius oppinione (quod non potest fieri nisi verbis vel aliis signis verborum vicem suplentibus) detrahere est. Quidam enim, cum non possint verbo, aliquo alio nutus vicem verbi suplente bonum alterius diminuunt, utpote cum aliquis in scolis opponit vel respondet conscolaris assidens cachino vel risu vel alio nutu signat et innuit alterius oppositionem vel responsem nullam esse. Etiam quandoque ipsa facie immobilitate et in capucium submersione innuit quod alterius oppositio vel responsio non est digna attendi audicione.' This same text is found in MS A.III.12, fol. 86rb. I am indebted to Suzanne Paul, who pointed out this text to me, and allowed me to consult her transcripton of the Durham manuscript. 47 Eccleston, in Fratris Thomae vulgo dicti de Eccleston, Tractatus De Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam ed. A.G. Little (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951), 48. 48 On the role of Preaching in the Franciscan order, see P.-M. Gy, 'Le statut ecclesiologique de 1'apostolat des precheurs et des mineurs avant la querelle des mendiants/ Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologic/ues 59 (1975), 78-88; and David d'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Roest, Franciscan Education, 273-324. 49 MSA.III.i2, fol. Sgvb. 50 Thomson, Writings, 216-32: the sermons are Dicta 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 14, 21 (which is a sermon but not sermon 68 as Thomson had supposed: see Ginther, 'Monastic Ideals and Episcopal Visitations,' in Muessig, ed., Medieval Monastic Preaching, 233-34), 35/ 37/ 3^, 4*/ 50, 51,52, 72, 87, 89, 90, 91, 101,103, 119, 135,137, and 138. See also Edwin J. Westermann, 'A Comparison of Some of the Sermons and the Dicta of Robert Grosseteste,' Medievalia et Humanistica 3 (1945), 49-68. To date, it would appear that Dicta 3 (preached at an ordination service) and 51 (preached at the proclamation of Grosseteste's diocesan statutes in 1239) are sermons from Grosseteste's episcopacy. 51 Thomson, Writings, 182-91. Suzanne Paul is preparing an edition of these sermons for her doctoral thesis at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds.

58 / James R. Ginther 52 Servus Gieben, 'Robert Grosseteste and the Immaculate Conception. With the Text of the Sermon Tota pulchra es' Collectanea Franciscana 28 (1958), 211-27; Gieben, 'Robert Grosseteste on Preaching. With the Edition of the Sermon Ex rerum initiarum,' Collectanea Franciscana 37 (1967), 100-41; McEvoy, 'Robert Grosseteste's Theory of Human Nature. With the Text of His Conference, Ecclesia sanctu celebrat,' Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 47 (1980), 131-87; McEvoy, 'Grosseteste on the Soul's Care for the Body: A New Text and New Sources for the Idea/ in Gunar Freibergs, ed., Aspectus et Affectus: Essays and Editions in Grosseteste and Medieval Intellectual Life in Honor of Richard C. Dales (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 37-56; McEvoy, 'Robert Grosseteste on the Cross and Redemptive Love. With the Text of His Sermon on Galatians 5:24 and Notes on Its Reception/ Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 66 (1999): 289-305. 53 Ginther, 'Natural Philosophy and Theology at Oxford.' An edition of the sermon is printed on 125-34. For the relevant exegetical issues, see Ginther, 'Laudat sensum et significationem: Robert Grosseteste on the Four Senses of Scripture/ in J. Dammen McAuliffe, B. Walfish, and J. Goering, eds., With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 237-55)54 A critical edition of the Dicta is underway, but transcriptions of the first 55 Dicta can be found on the Electronic Grosseteste web site: http: / / www. grosseteste. com /. 55 How these texts could be redeployed will be treated below. 56 See the diplomatic edition of the Tabula published by Philip Rosemann. 57 For parish clergy, Grosseteste wrote the Templum Dei and De decem mandatis, ed. R.C. Dales and E.B. King, Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi 10 (London: British Academy, 1987). He penned a confessional treatise for a monastic audience: Joseph Goering and F.A.C. Mantello, 'The Perambulavit ludas ... (Speculum confessionis) Attributed to Robert Grosseteste/ Revue Benedictine 96 (1986), 125-68. Later as bishop, he produced a confessional formula for his household; see Goering and Mantello, 'Notus in ludea Deus: Robert Grosseteste's Confessional Formula in Lambeth Palace MS 499,' Viator 18 (1987), 253-73. 58 Leonard E. Boyle, 'The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology/ in T.J. Heffernan, ed., The Popular Literature of Medieval England, Tennessee Studies in Literature 28 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 30-43. 59 For an excellent summary of this literary tradition, see A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. noo-c. 1375:

The Super Psalterium in Context / 59

60 61

62 63

64 65

66

67 68

69 70

71 72 73

The Commentary Tradition, Revised Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). M. Worton and J. Still, eds., Inter textuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), esp. the introduction (1-44). While this may appear to do violence to those concepts which I have drawn from intertextuality, I surely cannot be accused of de-contextnalising those concepts. After all, it remains my right as a reader to select the frame of reference for my reading of intertextual theory. Alistair Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988). Grosseteste, Dictum 19, ed. Ginther, 'Natural Philosophy and Theology at Oxford/ 126; Ginther, 'Robert Grosseteste on the Four Senses of Scripture.' Servus Gieben, 'Robert Grosseteste and the Evolution of the Franciscan Order/ in McEvoy, ed., Robert Grosseteste, New Perspectives, 227, n. 44. Printed in the appendix of Little's 1909 edition of Thomas of Eccleston: Fratris Thomae vulgo dicti de Eccleston, De Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam, ed. A.G. Little (Paris: Fischbacher, 1909), 178-87. Thomson, Writings, 168-9.I have consulted two other manuscripts of Sermon 8: London, British Library MS Royal 7-D.xv, fols. 2ir-28b, and MS Royal 7-E.ii, fols. 28ova-286ra. Grosseteste, Super Psalterium, 89.3 (Bologna, Biblioteca dell' Archiginnasio, fols.nova-vb). The signs of humility found in De humilitate contemplativorum are repeated verbatim in Dictum 142, and inform the discussion of humility in Dicta 21 and 141. All three Dicta are printed in E. Brown, Appendix ad Fasciculus rerum expetendarum ac fugiendarum, 2 vols. (London: Chiswell, 1690; repr. Tucson: Audax Press, 1967), 2: 288-93. See Appendix 2 for a description of the manuscripts, along with their assigned sigla. For a description of the manuscripts' contents, see James R. Ginther, 'The Super Psalterium of Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1170-1253): A Scholastic Psalms Commentary as a Source for Medieval Ecclesiology/ unpublished PhD diss. (University of Toronto, 1995), 52-5. Ibid., 65-74. Thomson, Writings, 76. Bella Millett, 'Mouvance and the Medieval Author: Re-editing the Ancrene Wisse,' in A.J. Minnis, ed., Late Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doy/e,York Manuscript Conference Proceedings 3 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 9-20, at 9-13, where a good summary of the literature is noted.

6o / James R. Ginther 74 Ibid., 13-15. 75 Ibid., 18-20. 76 Ginther, The Super Psalterium of Robert Grosseteste,' 41; B fol. i73vb: 'Explicit Lincolniensis super Psalterium quern reperitur ipsum fecisse secundum exemplar librorum librarie Oxonie. Amen.' For an alternative reading of this colophon, see Servus Gieben, 'Thomas Gascoigne and Robert Grosseteste: Historical and Critical Notes/ Vivarium 8 (1970): 56-67, at 62. 77 See Appendix 2, n.8. 78 B, fols. 65rb-66rb, where the first 25 paragraphs of the confessional treatise have been copied out in between the first version of the comments on Psalm 81 and the second version of comments on Psalm 80. Quoniam cogitacio circulated in 12 of the 20 manuscript collections of Grosseteste's sermons, as well as 13 other manuscripts: Thomson, Writings, 172. The editorial team of Joseph Goering and F.A.C. Mantello are currently completing a critical edition. 79 Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 198; R.W. Hunt, The Library of Robert Grosseteste,' in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. Callus, 121-45, at 133- Also relevant to an edition of the Super Psalterium are Peter Comestor's glosses on the Psalter found in Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 7, a manuscript that also contains Grosseteste's marginal notes. Further investigation is required in order to determine whether these glosses had an influence on Grosseteste's exposition. If Grosseteste did use these glosses in preparing his lectures, this manuscript may also aid in establishing the date of those lectures, at least relative to the Hexaemeron. Grosseteste left this manuscript with the library of Bury and St Edmonds, as a 'deposit' for borrowing a copy of Basil's Hexaemeron. This may indicate that Grosseteste first commented on the Psalms, and then on Genesis; ibid., 129,134. 80 Quoted in Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 'A last review,' Ixii: 'fui clericus, deinde magister in theologia et presbiter; et tandem episcopus.' Sermon 31, MS Royal 7-E.ii, fol. 344rb. Grosseteste gave this short biographical statement as an example that confessors must be aware of the social and institutional positions of the penitent, since they have a direct bearing on his moral responsibilities.

EVELYN A. MACKIE

3 Scribal Intervention and the Question of Audience: Editing Le Chateau d'amour

The Anglo-Norman1 Works: An Update Robert Grosseteste is widely known for his theological and scientific writings in Latin, but he is also credited with a handful of vernacular works. Harrison Thomson, in The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, lists eight Anglo-Norman texts attributed to the bishop.2 Not all of the 'texts' listed by Thomson are independent works. They can be divided into two categories: three are brief passages or vernacular phrasings embedded in Latin works or accompanying them (and arguably therefore not texts at all), and five are longer works which circulated independently and primarily, it seems, outside the latinate community. The shorter pieces are all found in a single manuscript, London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 499-3 They consist of an exhortation and a prayer relating to confession, a prayer to St Margaret, and a selection of table graces. The exhortation and prayer relating to confession have been published in their original Latin setting in the edition and study of Grosseteste's confessional formula by Joseph Goering and F. A.C. Mantello.4 The vernacular insertions in the Latin text appear to be illustrations of the bishop's recommendation that confession should be made in whichever language is best known to the penitent. The prayer to St Margaret,5 in which the saint is addressed as a personal patron, includes a remarkable declaration of Grosseteste's respect for women. An English translation of the prayer is included in James McEvoy's recent survey of Grosseteste's life and work.6 The table graces, the last of the three short items, have been considered to date as a single prayer and are grouped by Thomson under the heading Oraciuncula; they are, in fact, four separate prayers, three in Anglo-Norman and one Latin benediction with response. The initial portion of the passage printed by Thomson translates as follows: 'The

62 / Evelyn A. Mackie same [i.e., Grosseteste] was accustomed to say this after a meal: God be with us by his mercy, and keep us from evil and from sin; and grant that we might do his will, and keep us in health, helpful to the living and merciful toward the dead/7 Immediately following this are three other statements, two more in Anglo-Norman and one in Latin, each set off by Item. The content of each of the statements is similar: the speaker asks for the blessing of God's presence, the ability to live a good life and to die well, and to be brought at last to eternal life. What has been preserved here, therefore, is a sampling of the benedictions pronounced by the bishop after mealtime, rather than a single grace or prayer. The five longer independent pieces are extant in several manuscripts. Three of the texts have been edited: The Rules* Le Chateau d'amour,9 and Les Peines de Purgatorie.™ The Rules are twenty-eight 'rules' or recommendations for effective management of both personnel and resources on a large estate, and were based upon practices in the bishop's own household. The work was prepared for Margaret de Lacy, countess of Lincoln, twice widowed during the years of Grosseteste's episcopacy." Le Chateau d'amour is a verse text, and has been described by Sir Richard Southern as 'the fullest expression of his [Grosseteste's] pastoral theology for a popular audience.'12 This text is discussed below in the main portion of this paper. The third work, Les Peines de Purgatorie, is a prose meditation in six chapters on the pains of purgatory, the day of judgment, and the joys of the redeemed. Both the Latin and AngloNorman versions of the text were edited as a thesis in 1978. The editor, Robert J. Relihan, questions the attribution to Grosseteste for three reasons: not one of the seven Anglo-Norman versions is ascribed to the bishop, even though he is named as the author in all of the Latin manuscripts; an examination of the manuscript tradition led Relihan to conclude that the Latin version derived from the Anglo-Norman text/3 further calling into question those manuscript attributions which do exist; and finally, in comparing the Peines to aspects of Grosseteste's thought revealed in his other pastoral works, Relihan concludes that the Peines is not typical of his work. He suggests the later fourteenth- and fifteenth-century attributions in the Latin manuscripts may be examples of the tendency after the bishop's death to credit him with the composition of such works as Le manuel des peches and the Pricke of Conscience.'14 The final two independent texts, the Confessioun and Le manage des neuf filles du diable, have each been published once from individual manuscripts/5 The Confessioun is a lengthy prayer structured around confession of the seven deadly sins, ending with a confession of misuse of the five senses. Whether this prayer was composed by Grosseteste as

Editing Le Chateau d'amour / 63

a model or was recorded by an acquaintance as an example of the bishop's personal practice, as the prayers in Lambeth 499 (mentioned above) appear to have been, the content and phrasing are consistent with Grosseteste's style and thought and there is little reason to doubt the attribution, however we understand it.l6The attribution of Le manage des neuffilles du diable has never been questioned, but it does need to be seriously examined. The work, composed of 666 lines of octosyllabic rhyming couplets, develops an allegory not uncommon in Grosseteste's time of the marriages contracted by the devil for his daughters with certain groups in society.17 The poetic skill demonstrated in Le manage is not reflected in Le Chateau, and the tone of the former is more in keeping with contemporary sermons du siecle and their commentary on social ills than with Grosseteste's efforts to extend biblical and practical knowledge. While these inconsistencies may not in themselves rule out Grosseteste's authorship, they do offer grounds for querying it. An edition and study of the text would help to clarify whether it is indeed by Grosseteste. Le Chateau d'amour and Scribal Intervention Le Chateau d'amour is the longest of the Anglo-Norman texts attributed to Robert Grosseteste, and appears to have been the most widely circulated.18 As we have seen, not all of the attributions continue to stand, but no serious challenge has ever been raised regarding his authorship of Le Chateau. The text consists of iyyo19 lines, written in rhyming octosyllabic couplets.20 Its literary form, typical of AngloNorman romance poetry,21 and its content, replete with references and allusions to contemporary culture, made it popular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.22 Scholars have classified the work as an allegorical poem,23 a description highlighting the allegory of the King and his Four Daughters24 and the castle imagery used to represent the Virgin. The poem is perhaps better described, however, as an extremely succinct survey of Christian doctrine. The two allegorical passages together constitute just 30 per cent of the work, and they form an integral part of the text, essentially serving as exempla, albeit extremely elaborate ones.25 The following outline of the poem illustrates its overall structure. Author's prologue Genesis 1-3, creation, the Fall, results for humanity Exemplum of the Four Daughters Excerpts from the creed in praise of the Trinity

11.1-28 11. 29-204 11. 205-460 11. 461-68

64 / Evelyn A. Mackie Recap of the Fall, the need for God to become Man Introduction of Isaiah 9:6

11. 469-96 11. 497-518

Exposition ofMerveillus

11. 519-878

The castle segment Exposition of Consilere Dramatization of encounter with the devil Exposition of Tuit Puissant Exposition of Pere Exposition of Prince de pes The day of judgment

11. 566-820 11. 879-1212 11.1003-1110 11.1213-1352 11.1353-1492 11.1493-1768 11.1498-1646

The work is a brief but complete history of salvation. The author begins with creation and the fall. He draws upon the Cur Deus homo of Anselm of Canterbury to demonstrate the need for God to become man,26 and to introduce the incarnation chooses the prophecy of Isaiah 9:6 ('Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given... and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of peace'). The work then unfolds as a commentary on the prophet's names for Christ. Grosseteste selects events from the Gospels and prophecies from the Epistles and the Apocalypse to illustrate the significance of each of the names given by Isaiah. While preparing a new edition, I discovered in several manuscripts evidence of consistent and deliberate scribal intervention throughout the body of the text. I began to examine whether the intervention was audience-related, in part because some manuscripts were specifically prepared for female readers.27 The question of audience is often a difficult one, and certain identification of an initial audience for a medieval text is not always possible. Where no patron is named, or the author does not describe the expected readership, an editor is forced to rely on the history of the manuscripts, on references to the text in contemporary literature, if such information is available, or on indirect evidence within the text itself. Scribal intervention is one form of indirect internal evidence which may, on occasion, demonstrate specific kinds of revision. An editor's awareness of the overall consequences of such revision, conducted by individual scribes, may assist in establishing profiles not only of the scribes, but also of the audience for whom the text was revised, and ultimately, perhaps, even of the initial audience for whom the text was composed. The potential for this kind of analysis became evident to me as I worked with the manuscripts of Le Chateau.

Editing Le Chateau d'amour / 65 While some manuscripts do identify owners, the identity of the initial audience for Le Chateau has never been unequivocally demonstrated. Proposals have ranged from a noble household28 to the young sons of Simon de Montfort, who were under Grosseteste's tutelage in the early 1250S.29 Recent re-examination of the manuscripts, however, points to a composition date prior to Grosseteste's episcopacy.30 The manuscripts also offer clear evidence of a scholastic audience in the early stages of textual transmission.31 While it is not possible to enter here into a full discussion of the text's initial audience, an audience of Franciscans needs to be considered.32 The text has been viewed to date as intended for the laity (read 'non-religious'), chiefly because it is written in vernacular verse. The content of the work, however, has raised questions for scholars who queried how much of the text an average lay audience would have grasped. An initial audience with a background in theological instruction would help to explain the sophistication of the text, as well as the degree and the kind of intervention seen in London, BL MS Harley 1121 discussed below. Intervention in Le Chateau d'amour The kinds of scribal intervention observed in the text of Le Chateau fall into four groups: substitutions of synonymous words or phrases, rephrasings (which effectively constitute internal glosses), deletion, and interpolation. The first two categories, synonymous substitutions and limited rephrasings, sometimes offer legitimate alternative readings to an editor engaged in establishing a text as close to the authorial original as possible.33 Assessment of these readings may reveal a consistent type of intervention on the part of a scribe, indicating that he or she is serving the audience as more than a copyist. While it is true that some variant readings and interventions, particularly interpolation, tell us much about the scribe and little or nothing about the audience, some grasp of the possible motives of an intervening scribe can contribute to an increased understanding of the expected readership. The varying degrees of scribal intervention in Le Chateau point to the conclusion that the overall audience for the work (including both the initial and the extended audience) was clearly composed of more than one societal group.34 Three of the manuscripts are known to have been prepared for women: Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale Albert ier, MS 9030-37 (Br2), was written for Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, in the second half of the fifteenth century;35 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS McClean

66 / Evelyn A. Mackie 123 (F), also known as the Nuneaton codex, belonged in the fourteenth century to the convent of Nuneaton, of the order of Fontevrault;36 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Robert H. Taylor Medieval MS i (Pr), belonged in the late thirteenth century to Joan Tateshal of Lincolnshire, and was prepared for her or for another woman in her family.37 There is only one variant reading which appears to have been inserted for the benefit of a female audience. Near the end of the text, at 1.1746, the phrase tuz les homes (all men or all people) is changed to tote la gent (all people); this variant occurs in the Brussels and Princeton manuscripts,38 and in a third, Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 232.39 While it is not certain that the substitution was made out of concern for inclusive language (the phrases are considered to be synonymous in meaning), it is interesting that the reading is found in only three of the fourteen manuscripts which contain those lines, and two of those three are known to have been prepared for women. Further attention to similar variant readings in copies of vernacular texts known to have been prepared for women may allow us to assess whether this particular substitution was commonly done for the benefit of a female audience.40 The interests and abilities of the scribes, rather than those of the audience, are demonstrated by variant readings in London, British Library MS Egerton 846 (E), a fourteenth-century copy of the text, and Br2, Margaret of York's fifteenth-century manuscript. The scribe of E used the term elemenz (elements) instead of aurnemenz (embellishments or ornaments), in lines referring to the creation: eel e terrefait aveit, / od tuit lur aurnemenz ([he] had made heaven and earth, with all that pertained to them). The original reading is deemed to have been aurnemenz, a cognate of the Latin ornatus in Genesis 2:1 which forms the basis for this portion of the text (11. 46-7). The more technical elemenz may indicate a scientifically inclined scribe, a suggestion supported by the fact that E was once part of a manuscript compilation which included several works by John of Sacrobosco, the Theorica planetarum of Gerard of Cremona, and other scientific texts.41 Another learned scribe, David Aubert, is credited with the preparation of Br2.42 He substituted the word essense for chose in the first of two lines referring to the consequences of the fall: Ke terryene chose feust, /chescune chose sun dreit eust (whatever earthly thing there was, each received its due, 11.157-8). This may have been a stylistic change to avoid repetition of chose, or even an attempt to clarify between nature or substance, and individual creatures. Such cases, in which a scribe substitutes more sophisticated terminology, are rare among the manuscripts which preserve Le Chateau.

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More commonly, scribes substituted less complex vocabulary in order to clarify or interpret the text for the readers or listeners. Some limited evidence for this is found in F (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS McClean 123),43 but the most extensive intervention of this type is found in London, British Library MS Harley 1121 (H1).44 H1 is also the only copy which preserves a full French translation of both the Latin prologue and rubrics. The completeness of the translation implies both an audience with very limited ability to read or understand Latin and a scribe willing to undertake the translation in order not to deprive his readers of the apparatus found in his exemplar. The scribe could have chosen to copy the Latin regardless (many did), or to delete the prologue and rubrics altogether. The choice to translate the Latin material alerts us to the presence of an 'interested' scribe.45 The scribe of the Harley manuscript maintained an awareness of the capabilities of the audience throughout the copying process. Theological and technical terms are simplified: in a reference to the four cardinal virtues (1.704), the scribe substituted principeaux (sic, chief, principal) for cardinaus (cardinal); in a legal analogy depicting Christ pleading for humanity (1. 875), parler (to speak) replaces the term pleider (to plead); when the author speaks of the devil being caught like a fish on a lure,46 the scribe removed the word heym (lure, 1.1108) and adjusted the line to read com est en eawe le pessun (as a fish is in the water) instead of com est al heym le pessun (as a fish is on a lure). Less common verbs are replaced by more common ones: in describing Jesus' request at the marriage of Cana that nearby vessels be filled with water, rova (or ruva, requested) becomes comanda (commanded, 1. 1253);47 in a reference to daybreak (1. 1392), creva (from crever, to break, as in the breaking of dawn) becomes leva (from lever, to rise, used with reference to sunrise).48 One or two variant readings of this type might be attributable to a scribe not showing sufficient attention to the exemplar, while still having an awareness of the meaning of the text, but the consistency with which these substitutions are made suggests active scribal analysis of both the textual content and the expected comprehension level of the audience. At the same time, the scribe is careful to not shift the tone or content in any way. Other kinds of rephrasing found in H1 demonstrate this further. The scribe shows a tendency to clarify allegorical references. At 1. 264, in a description of the fate of the king's servant in the allegory of the Four Daughters, the phrase avez en grief prison mis (placed in a harsh prison) becomes avez en greif torment mys (placed in grievous torment). The

68 / Evelyn A. Mackie substituted term, torment, evokes descriptions of hell, the meaning of the allegorical prison, rather than the specific language of the allegory. At 1. 809, in a reference to the opposition of the vices against the human soul, the scribe changed hostz (hosts, or enemies, oz in Murray's edition) to engins (weapons, or engines of war), a more concrete image; at 11.1042-3 in the dramatization of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness, when the author has Jesus say to Satan 'quant en traison lui deistes, "tu ne morrez pas portant"' ('when in betrayal you said to him, "you will not die, however"'), the scribe adjusts the line to identify the speakers: 'quant entre tei e Adam deistes/ etc. ('when between you and Adam, you said...'). These kinds of clarification suggest an audience not quite as biblically literate, nor as at home with biblical allegory, as the one for whom the author originally wrote. In the same wilderness dialogue (1.1067), in a negotiation over the ransom to be paid for humanity, there are statements by both Jesus and Satan contained in a single line; H1 omits the question posed by Jesus, but retains the sense of the passage with a minor adjustment. The text reads 'Com chier?' 'Mais tant cum il vaut' ([J] 'How dearly?' - [S] 'As much as he is worth'); H1 reads simply 'Vous paierey atant com il vaut' ([S] 'You will pay as much as he is worth'). Only one manuscript, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS fr. 902 (P), uses superscripts (Jhesus, diabolus) to identify the changes of speaker throughout this dramatization. Since exchanges in the dialogue consist, on occasion, of a single word, changes of speaker are not always immediately obvious to the reader, a fact not lost on the scribe of H1. The final example from H1 is an internal gloss on two lines of Scripture, and it reinforces the observations made thus far. At 11.1377-8, the text reads Par Adam furent tuz dampnez, e par Jhesum resuscitez (Through Adam all were condemned, and through Jesus raised to life); H1 adds immediately after, car Adam nous perdi par inobedience, Jhesu nous recoveri par la pacience (for Adam lost us through disobedience, [and] Jesus restored us through suffering). This may seem superfluous commentary, but it is not; it relates the theological assertion of humanity's transition from death to life to the physical actions of Adam and Christ. The intent of the gloss is consistent with previously noted interventions in this manuscript,49 and demonstrates that in H1 we are dealing with a scribe of considerable theological sophistication, a characteristic not always anticipated in a copyist of vernacular text. It is also clear that, in the mind of the scribe, his immediate audience differed from the one envisioned by the author.50 Deletion of text occurs in only two manuscripts.51 In London, British Library MS Royal 2O.B.XIV (R), the scribe omitted a portion of the autho-

Editing Le Chateau d'amour / 69

rial prologue (a brief description of the content, 11. 29-42) and replaced it with his own list of eighteen numbered titles which he declared would 'unlock the chapters' (les chapitres destuterunt). The unnumbered titles are then inserted as rubrics throughout the text. Although three other manuscripts contain rubrics, none inserts what is so plainly a table of contents in this way. It is possible that the scribe merely intended to give the reader a clearer understanding of how the text would unfold, but the scholastic-style apparatus suggests that it may have been prepared for an audience accustomed to searching a text for specific content.52 This particular intervention points to the possibility that Le Chateau, as well as being used by the laity as a devotional text, may have been used by clergy or religious as a preaching or teaching resource.53 The second manuscript to show deletion is the fifteenth-century copy prepared for Margaret of York, Br2, which also displays revisions in vocabulary and syntax not unexpected in a copy post-dating the original composition by nearly 250 years. Some deletion of theological and biblical references occurs, but omissions in general appear to have been based on stylistic decisions: passages which might be deemed repetitious or too lengthy, for example, are removed.54 One group of deletions is worth noting, however. TTiree passages which describe the person or the role of the Virgin have been omitted: a description of the way in which Mary's beauty was enhanced by the carrying of the Christ child (11. 779-84); the prayer (11. 789-816) to the chatelaine of the castle by the beleaguered champion who seeks shelter from the enemies that surround him (the world, the flesh, and the devil); and twenty-six lines near the end of the text (11. 1715-40) in praise of the singular beauty of the Virgin as she appears in heaven. The third passage may have been omitted coincidentally, since it is located in the middle of a long description of heaven which was removed,55 but the other two deletions cannot be explained in this way. In a recent article on the representation of the Virgin in Le Chateau, Christiania Whitehead suggests that women readers construed Grosseteste's descriptions of Mary as a 'representation of exemplary womanhood/56 and that the presence of the Virgin in a text was of particular interest to a female audience. The omission of material relating to the Virgin in this particular manuscript, one prepared for a woman, serves as a cautionary reminder that references to or descriptions of the Virgin were not necessarily considered to have especial relevance for women,57 either by women themselves, or by their copyists. Finally, interpolation of new or borrowed text is found in two closely related manuscripts, H1 (Harley 1121) and Pr (Princeton, R.H. Taylor Medieval MS i). The interpolations, inserted near the end of the text, do

70 / Evelyn A. Mackie not occur at the same point in the two manuscripts, a fact suggesting that individual scribes, perhaps faced with marginal additions in their exemplar(s), made their own decisions on placement. The added text is apocalyptic in tone. Four lines (added at 1. 1524) directly address wealthy readers, asking what will become of their beautiful homes at the end of the world.58 Pr contains an additional fifty lines (at 1.1540) on the catastrophic events of the day of judgment, while a somewhat shorter version (twenty-eight lines) is found in H1. In both copies, the existing description of hell is expanded and there are two additions on the joys of paradise. The interpolated content suggests the motivations of a preacher, seeking to challenge and convict his hearers of the fleeting enjoyment of worldly wealth and the eternal gravity of their choices. Such additions would not be inconsistent with Franciscan or clerical use of the text for instruction of the laity. These examples of deliberate intervention demonstrate thatLe Chateau passed through the hands of several copyists who consciously acted as interpreters of the text or who attempted in some way to facilitate its reception and use. In general, the scribes appear to have been prompted by a desire to make the text more accessible, and not by any inclination to revise it from a literary standpoint. (The latest manuscript, the fifteenth-century copy for Margaret of York, is the sole exception to this, since some of the revisions and deletions do appear to have been motivated by stylistic considerations.) Even the scribe who initiated the interpolations in H1 and Pr, expanding eschatological content and questioning the value of wealth, while perhaps not viewing the additions as making the text more accessible, may have conceived of the revisions as making the text more appropriate for the audience, that is, for a wealthy nobility.59 The interventions themselves suggest that the text was read by audiences with different levels of education, pursuing different patterns of life, and using the text in quite different ways - some as devotional reading, and some as a preaching resource. Conclusion Any comprehensive attempt to assess scribal intervention in a text is necessarily based upon the assumption of an authorial original and upon the belief that the authorial version can and should be retrieved, or at least reasonably approximated. Such assumptions regarding vernacular texts are increasingly being called into question.601 would argue, however, that some texts, particularly didactic works, are most

Editing Le Chateau d'amour / 71

effectively studied through the preparation of a critical edition, regardless of the format in which the editor finally presents the work. While this format may not be suitable for every vernacular didactic text,61 in cases where textual integrity is fairly stable and external criteria exist for assessing whether or not a reading is authorial, the method is still valuable. When consistent patterns of variation are scattered throughout the manuscripts, as in the case of Le Chateau, the creation of a critical apparatus facilitates recognition and analysis of individual scribal intervention, thus permitting an editor to observe what may amount to scribal perceptions of differences between the initial audience of the work and the audiences for whom the scribes copied their manuscripts. The most obvious example in the manuscripts cited above is BL MS Harley 1121. It was the consistency and the kind of intervention practiced by the scribe of H1, combined with the textual presentation in other manuscripts, that pointed to the need to consider an initial scholarly audience for the text. Assessment of scribal intervention, while it may not always lead to definite conclusions regarding audience identification, can provide an editor with one more lens through which to examine the difficult and important question of audience. NOTES 1 Anglo-Norman is defined as the dialectal form of Old French which developed in England after the Norman Conquest. According to M.K. Pope, this was still a legitimate description of the language form roughly up to the middle of the thirteenth century; thereafter, linguistic fidelity to continental French began to decline. Mildred K. Pope, From Latin to Modern French, with especial consideration of Anglo-Norman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934), 424, § 1077. 2 Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 152-9. 3 See Thomson's items 115,117,118. These passages, which have the flavour of personal reminiscences, lend credence to the suggestion that Lambeth 499 was compiled by a member of Grosseteste's household, as noted in Goering and Mantello, 'Notus in ludea Deus: Robert Grosseteste's Confessional Formula in Lambeth Palace MS 499,' Viator 18 (1987), 253-73, at 258. 4 See Goering and Mantello, 'Notus in ludea Deus.' 5 There is a note in the table of contents for Lambeth 499, beside the listing for this item, that Master Solomon of Dover (a friend of Grosseteste

72 / Evelyn A. Mackie

6

7

8

9

10

11

12 13

and for a time his personal chaplain) was also accustomed to say this prayer. McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste, Great Medieval Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 148-9. See also McEvoy's paper in this volume, p. 19. Idem post prandium hoc dicere consuevit: Deu seit od nus par sa pite e nus defende de mal e de pecche e nus dointfere sa volonte e nus meyne en saunte e consent a vifs e merciface a morz. Thomson, Writings, no. 118,158. Walter of Henley's Husbandry, together with an anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie, and Robert Grosseteste's Rules, ed. Elizabeth Lamond (London: Longmans, Green, 1890); Walter of Henley and other treatises on estate management and accounting, ed. Dorothea Oschinsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Le Chateau d'amour de Robert Grosseteste, Eveque de Lincoln, ed. J. Murray (Paris: Champion, 1918). I am currently preparing a new edition of Le Chateau. An edition and study of the Middle English versions of the text was published in 1967 by Kari Sajavaara, The Middle English Translations of Robert Grosseteste's 'Chateau d'amour' (Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique, 1967). Robert J. Relihan, A Critical Edition of the Anglo-Norman and Latin versions of'Les Peines de Purgatorie' (unpublished PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1978). Lamond, Walter of Henley's Husbandry, 40-2. Although the date traditionally suggested for the work is 1240-2, just after the death of Margaret's first husband, John de Lacy, a later date, sometime after 1245, is worthy of consideration. Margaret and John de Lacy received the earldom through Margaret's mother, Hawise, youngest sister of Ranulf of Chester. Ranulf entrusted the honour of Lincoln to her shortly before his death in 1231. Margaret was twice widowed during Grosseteste's episcopacy: John de Lacy died in 1240, and Margaret's second husband, Walter Marshall, the earl of Pembroke, died in 1245. Her mother Hawise also died in 1245; see G.E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage, vol. 7 (London: St Catherine Press, 1929), 678-80. These circumstances suggest that Margaret would have been more in need of outside advice in 1245 than in 1240. (Recent assessment of internal evidence by Louise Wilkinson has independently confirmed this suggestion. Ms. Wilkinson's paper on the revised dating of the Rules was presented at the 2001 Leeds Medieval Conference.) Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 225. Relihan, Critical Edition, i35ff.

Editing Le Chateau a"amour / 73 14 For comment on both attributions see EJ. Arnould, Le manuel des peches. Etude de litterature religieuse anglo-normande, xnf siecle (Paris: Droz, 1940), 250-1. 15 For the Confessioun see Hermann Urtel, 'Eine altfranzosische Beichte/ Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie 33 (1909), 571-5; for Les neuffilles du diable, see Paul Meyer, 'Notice du MS Rawlinson Poetry 241,' Romania 29 (1900), 54-72, section 8. 16 The Confessioun is known from two manuscripts: London, British Library MS Egerton 3277, and Hamburg, Stadtbibliothek, Cod. Philol. No. 296.1 am presently preparing an edition, translation, and study of the text. (The Hamburg ms. was the source of the version published by Urtel, 'Eine altfranzosische Beichte.') 17 Meyer printed parallel passages from the works of Odo of Cheriton and Jacques de Vitry; see 'Notice du MS Rawlinson Poetry 241,' 55-6. 18 The text is preserved in eighteen manuscripts. Thomson, Writings, lists sixteen; the two others are York, York Minster Library MS XVI.K-7 and Princeton University Library, Robert H. Taylor Medieval MS i. Four of the eighteen manuscripts lack some portion of the text: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86 contains only the allegory of the Four Daughters (lines 205-470); York, York Minster MS XVI.K-7 begins at line 48 and ends at line 668; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS McClean 123 ends at line 834; Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 99 ends at line 1542. Medieval library catalogues record the existence of fourteen copies, two of which are extant: Lambeth 522 and Corpus Christi College 232. 19 Murray's edition, Le Chateau d'amour de Robert Grosseteste, contains 1768 lines, although only 1767 were printed because one line was accidently deleted after line 1748: tant com le mund pent durer (from Murray's ms C). My new edition contains 1770 lines. 20 The term 'octosyllabic' is approximate; the syllable count per line varies from six to eight. 21 M.D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 14. 22 Thirty-one copies are known to have existed. Eighteen manuscripts are extant; medieval library catalogues show records for a further twelve copies. One other copy was destroyed in Metz in the Second World War. I wish to thank Miss Ruth Dean for drawing the Metz ms. to my attention. 23 Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, 223; Sajavaara, The Middle English Translations, 37.

74 / Evelyn A. Mackie 24 A brief history of the allegory's sources is given in Sajavaara, The Middle English Translations, 62-90. 25 The author himself describes his account of the Four Daughters as an ensample, 1. 457 of Murray's edition. Line references in this paper are keyed to Murray's edition. 26 See lines 469-82, and compare Cur Deus homo, 2.6-7, m $• Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, ed. F.S. Schmitt, vol. 2 (Rome: n.p., 1940), 101-2. 27 Two manuscripts were prepared for individual women, one for a religious community, see below, nn. 35-7. 28 See Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 225. 29 See M.D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, 223, and Sajavaara, The Middle English Translations, 46-8. 30 Manuscript evidence in support of a composition date in the preepiscopal period of Grosseteste's life is discussed in the introduction to the author's modern English prose translation of Le Chateau in Mackie, 'Robert Grosseteste's Anglo-Norman Treatise on the Loss and Restoration of Creation, commonly known as Le Chateau A.'amour. An English Prose Translation,' in Maura O'Carroll, ed., Robert Grosseteste and the Beginnings of a British Theological Tradition (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 2003). 31 The copy in Paris, BNF MS fr. 902 contains Latin marginal glosses throughout the text, written in the text hand. Three other copies, London, BL MS Egerton 846, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 132, and Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 232 show evidence of exposure to the glosses recorded in the Paris manuscript. 32 Arguments in favour of an initial audience of Franciscans are presented in the forthcoming article mentioned in n. 30. 33 Although some scholars have questioned the validity of critical editions for vernacular texts, e.g., Derek Pearsall, 'Editing Medieval Texts: Some Developments and Some Problems,' in Jerome J. McGann, ed., Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 92-106, esp. 100-1, and Bella Millett, 'Mouvance and the Medieval Author: Re-editing Ancrene Wisse,' in Alistair J. Minnis, ed., Late Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A.I. Doyle, York Manuscript Conference Proceedings 3 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), 9-20, esp. 12-13, it is important to note that this criticism is directed primarily at editions of literary texts. I will argue below that the application of a critical editorial process to a didactic text, in order to retrieve an approximation of an authorial version, is still useful. 34 The textual presentation in some manuscripts supports this conclusion:

Editing Le Chateau d'amour / 75

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

Paris, BNF MS fr. 902, preserves marginal notes on sources and brief commentary in Latin in the text hand throughout; London, BL MS Harley 1121, discussed below, was evidently prepared for readers who did not understand much Latin. See manuscript description in J. van den Gheyn, Catalogue des Manuscrits de la Bibliothecjue Royale de Belgique (Bruxelles: H. Lamertin, 1903), 409-11, item 2306. Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts 1250-1285, vol. 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1988) 193-5, item 1^7- This manuscript contains just under one half of the text, terminating at the end of the castle description (1. 830, Murray edition). See Adelaide Bennett, 'A Book Designed for a Noblewoman: An Illustrated Manuel des Peches of the Thirteenth Century/ in Linda Brownrigg, ed., Medieval Book Production: Assessing the Evidence (Los Altos, CA: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990), 163-81. The Fitzwilliam manuscript does not contain this line, and so cannot be compared with the other manuscripts known to have been prepared for women; see above, n. 36. The manuscript has been identified as having been part of the library at St Augustine's, Canterbury, in the fourteenth century; see A.G. Watson, ed., Medieval Libraries of Great Britain. A List of Surviving Books. Supplement to the 2nd edition (London: Royal Historical Society, 1987), 131. The substitution of la gent for les homes is not found, for example, in the version of Edmund of Abingdon's Mirour de seinte Eglyse prepared for a female audience in the early thirteenth century. Egerton 846 and Egerton 844, the portion now containing the scientific texts, at one time formed Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.3.44; see D. Winstanley, 'Halliwell Phillipps and Trinity College Library,' The Library. A Quarterly Review of Bibliography, 5th ser., vol. 2 (London: Bibliographic Society, 1948): 250-77. Whether this manuscript was prepared by Aubert himself may not be possible to determine, but it has been definitely linked to his atelier, see G. Dogaer, 'Margareta van York, bibliofiele,' in Handelingen van den Koninklijke Kring voor Oudheidkunde, Letteren en Kunst van Mechelen, 79 (1975), 99-111, at 102. Like the scribal interventions in H1, most variant readings in F simplify technical language (reson, lecture or argument, becomes oreison, prayer or oration, 1. 36) or clarify biblical references (Ysa'ie becomes le prophete Ysa'ie, 1. 54). H1 is closely related to another copy of the text, Pr, Princeton University Library, Robert H. Taylor Medieval MS i. Neither is a copy of the other,

6 / Evelyn A. Mackie

45

46 47

48

49

50

51

but they are clearly part of the same family. They share the same selection and placement of rubrics, and demonstrate some overlap in interpolations found near the end of the text, in passages referring to the day of judgment. The history of H1 is uncertain, although it is believed to have belonged to the cathedral of Durham at one time; see C.E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani: A Study of the Sources of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts Preserved in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: The British Museum, 1972), 142. Although H1 and Pr, the Princeton manuscript, are related, Pr retains the Latin prologue and all the Latin rubrics. H''s translations closely parallel both the content and the placement of the rubrics in Pr . This is a reference to Gregory's commentary on Job 40.20; see Hugh of St Cher's Postilla super totam Bibliam, 1.1, f. 456va (Venice, 1732). Murray's edition reads comanda. More than one scribe offered a replacement for rova, some of whom appear to have copied trova (found) from a preceding line. Since H1 and Pr both read comanda, this change may have originated earlier in the transmission, but this cannot be demonstrated with certainty. Even if this were the case, the loss of one example does not change the overall weight of evidence that the scribe of H1 intervened consistently throughout the text. Crever can have negative connotations, depending on the context of its use; it may be that this had a bearing on the scribe's decision to find an alternative term. H1 is the only manuscript to read leva, the fourteen other mss which record this line all contain some form of crever. This is a reverse example of the author's own pattern throughout the work. Grosseteste occasionally offers a theological assessment or observation after citing an exemplum whereas the scribe has expounded the theological statement (a biblical quotation) by a recap of biblical events. It is conceivable that Grosseteste wrote Le Chateau for a Franciscan audience. There were members of the order in the first years after their arrival in England (1224) who were described as laid and illiterati, and who would not have been able to read Latin. The scholastic study of the text evident in the Paris manuscript and the descriptive Latin prologue found in the majority of the extant manuscripts indicate assessment and use of the text in a scholastic context, and offer some light on the early stages of transmission. This evidence is discussed in Mackie, Robert Grosseteste's Chasteu d'amur: A Text in Context (unpublished PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2002), chapters i and 2. When referring to deletion, I do not include incomplete copies or excerpts, such as F, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS McClean 123, which contains just under 900 lines, or Di, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86, which preserves only the allegory of the Four Daughters.

Editing Le Chateau d'amour / 77 52 On the development of tables of contents, see M.B. Parkes, 'The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book/ in M.B. Parkes, Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 35-70, at 53. 53 While this may seem an unlikely suggestion for a vernacular verse text, Le Chateau is exclusively biblical and theological in its content. There are none of the digressions on social ills (and very few instructions for conduct) which are common in vernacular religious texts. The allegorical passages are taken from biblical allegory (including the castle), and allusions to contemporary culture are used by the author strictly as analogies or exempla to more effectively convey the theological concepts expounded by him in the text. The use of the text as a preaching resource would follow naturally if, for example, it had indeed been initially produced for the Franciscans whom Grosseteste taught while he was lector of the Oxford convent during the years 1229-35. 54 These include passages in praise of Christ, lines reminiscent of the creeds which recur throughout the text, and descriptions of heaven and hell. 55 See n. 54. 56 Christiania Whitehead, 'A Fortress and a Shield: The Representation of the Virgin in the Chateau d'amour of Robert Grosseteste,' in Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead, eds., Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 109-32, esp. 113. 57 For further discussion on this topic, see Caroline Walker Bynum, '"... And Woman His Humanity": Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages/ in Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 257-88. Also relevant is Bynum's discussion in the introduction of the multivalent nature of religious symbols. 58 After 1.1524: Ou devendront vos mesons, / vos beles habitacions? / Touz lur covendra faillir, /car pres eirt le mond defynir. 59 The history of Pr, for example, demonstrates that the text had indeed moved into the hands of wealthy laity, to whom the interpolations are directed. 60 See references in n. 33, above. Bella Millett acknowledges that Bedier's and Zumthor's criticisms of critical editions are related to their concern for literary texts, and do not address didactic or religious works. 61 The degree of intervention is relevant. Bella Millett expresses doubts about the usefulness of a single critical edition for Ancrene Wisse, for example, see Millett, 'Mouvance and the Medieval Author/ 13.

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CANDICE TAYLOR QUINN

4 Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum: Accessing Spiritual Realities through the Word

Robert Grosseteste's engagement with the texts of Dionysius the Areopagite constitutes at once one of the most significant dimensions of his intellectual life and, for the modern interpreter, one of the most challenging to effectively explicate. A testament to the character of Grosseteste's intellectual and spiritual inclinations, which are observable as predominantly comprehensive and inclusive, his work with the Dionysian corpus reveals his deepest convictions concerning the sacred dimension of human nature and the visible cosmos, and the right relationship of creatures to the Creator. In form, it reveals the actual nature of Grosseteste's approach to inquiry about God evident in his utilization of sources, and in methodologies beyond what had become normative for his time, or traditional for his contemporaries. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Grosseteste afforded a value to these lesser known, ancient works in a foreign language that compelled him to become knowledgeable in the language and cultural matrix out of which the terms and concepts were formed. Compelled not externally, because he was inadequately exposed to contemporaneous writers or ill-trained in the emerging dialectic approach, but internally, because he understood that reality was truthfully apprehended and articulately described by Dionysius, he became convinced that allegorical-symbolic epistemology was superior to any other way of knowing. What Grosseteste encountered substantively in the books of Dionysius strongly informs his views of theological truths and the doctrines contained therein. Here I take 'inform' to be less a mode of acceptance due to the authoritative nature of an author's status, and more a symbiotic coupling of assent to doctrines which resonate with convictions previously held or held on other, perhaps supra-rational, grounds. This study will suggest that Grosseteste's commitment to Dionysian metaphysics reveals and

8o / Candice Taylor Quinn supplements his own patristically driven Christological theology, in a threefold manner: the tendency to incorporate as equally relevant particular forms ofgnosis as a means to salvation, and to hold it as important as moral rectitude; to embrace divine immanence as existentially real and as correspondingly significant as divine transcendence; and to affirm his unified view of the cosmos as emanating from the One, hierarchically arranged, dynamically mediated, infused with light with the sole purpose of return to the One. My own work of critically editing Robert Grosseteste's translation of, and commentary on, De ecclesiastica hierarchia of Dionysius has afforded the opportunity to consider seriously the place and significance of Grosseteste's work with the Dionysian corpus relative to both his intellectual progress and his theological convictions. The challenges presented to the process of editing Grosseteste's work of Greek translations and commentary have, in this case, been matched by the insights gained at the end of the efforts. One aspect of these particular challenges has to do with the pseudonymity of Dionysius. Although a certain degree of skepticism as to authorship has accompanied the Dionysian writings from the start of their known history, in 750 a believing Pope Paul I sent to Pepin a copy of these texts, and again in 827 the Byzantine Emperor Michael Balbus made a gift of a manuscript copy, transcribed in Greek, to King Louis the Pious. By these times Eastern scholars had overcome earlier doubts surrounding the authenticity of authorship and had accepted the work as that of the same Dionysius mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, who, as a member of the court of the Areopagus in Athens, had been converted by the preaching of St Paul in that place.1 Doubt regarding the attribution originally arose when, at a council in Constantinople in 533, the Monophysite faction quoted Dionysius as an authority in defense of their position. The opposing orthodox contingent asked: why, if this selfidentified authority was of such antiquity, had not one of the Fathers or apologists ever cited him? In fact, as modern scholarship confirms, no reference to Dionysius can be found before this conciliar debate. However, Dionysius was cited once again, at the Lateran Council of 649 as an authority against Monothelitism.2 Gregory the Great alludes to the work of Dionysius at several key points in his own writing and seems to hold him in high esteem. Eusebius, concerned to record for posterity the apostolic succession, states that Dionysius, the convert of Paul, became the first bishop of Athens; although modern scholarship has revealed this assertion to be based on apocrypha, with the backing of Eusebius it adhered permanently to the authorial narrative. In the sixth

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 81 century John of Scythopolis appended a Prologue to the Dionysian corpus which attempted to confirm the author's sub-apostolic status and reconcile some of the more ambiguous passages and terms to orthodoxy by means of his own glosses on the text. In the mid-seventh century Maximus the Confessor provided additional extensive glosses on the text, with the same goal in mind.3 Concern over authenticity had by that time apparently shifted to concerns over potential heterodoxies. Perhaps out of respect for eastern scholarship, perhaps due to the tenor of the time when the Dionysian corpus reached the west, its authoritative status remained unquestioned by intellectuals in the Latin traditions. Hilduin, the Abbot of the royal monastery just north of Paris, completed a translation of the corpus into Latin by 838. He also provided a hagiographic account, Passio sanctissimi Dionysii, in which the Areopagite's missionizing journey to Paris was related, as was the story of the subsequent selection of this same Dionysius (Denys, in French) as bishop of Paris before being martyred by the heathen.4 The royal abbey was endowed in honor of St Denys, who, logically, became the patron saint of France. In 860 a badly needed new Latin translation of the corpus was ordered by the king and undertaken by John Scottus Eriugena. Even at a glance it is clear that Eriugena's philosophy draws heavily on Dionysian thought forms, which may, indeed, be the source both of the originality and of the related suspected heterodoxy of his cosmology and metaphysics.5 Interest on the part of western thinkers seems to have waned until the mid-twelfth century when the canons regular of St Victor exhibited a pronounced interest in the Dionysian corpus. Hugh of St Victor produced a commentary on the first book, De celestia hierarchia, circa 1160, and Thomas Callus of Vercelli, also a Victorine, compiled a Compendiosa extractio of the Dionysian writings, which became a widespread and well-known source for interested scholars. Through the Victorines Dionysian thought became influential at the school of Chartres and among the Porretains of Paris.6 Awareness of the Dionysian books passed naturally from the cathedral schools to the emerging universities over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At the same time, as dialectic methodology inherent in scholasticism came to dominate learned circles, the symbolic theology and mystical spirituality of Dionysius became less generally consequential. Contrary to trends, however, Robert Grosseteste exhibits an intense and enduring interest in the writings and at a significant point in his career employs all the resources afforded by his episcopal position in the acquisition, retranslation and elucidation of these complex and esoteric writings.

82 / Candice Taylor Quinn The four books that comprise the Dionysian corpus, translated and commented on by Grosseteste, are De celestia hierarchia, which describes the nine choirs of angels, their natures and qualities, their arrangement in hierarchical form, and the nature of hierarchy generally; De ecclesiastica hierarchia, on the church, its rites, offices, and officers, seen as parallel and analogous to the angelic, spiritual hierarchy; De divina nominibus, in which the nature and attributes of God are explained based on the names given him in the Bible; and De mystica theologia, which treats the ultimate mystical union of the soul with God by means of the negation of his attributes as acknowledgment of his absolute transcendence and, therefore, unintelligibility.7 On the exterior level Dionysius appears every bit the Christian exegete. He alludes to Christ as the head and font of every hierarchy and he claims at many points to be revealing the mysteries contained and hidden in sacred scripture, both Old and New Testaments. He continually employs Christian concepts within his larger cosmological scheme of procession and return, including ideas such as deification, sacraments, and priestly orders, and his discussion of angelic natures, the Incarnation, and the nature of monastic virtue are, for the most part, ostensibly orthodox. A more critical investigation reveals that the fundamental structure and dynamic of Dionysius's scheme is firmly based on late antique Neoplatonism. The attempt to explain multiplicity in the universe by tracing it back to a primordial unity is the thrust of the Plotinian, and subsequently Dionysian, program. For Plotinus, all things are derived from the One and owe their existence to a declension from unity. The outward movement of radiation from the One (procession) is met by an analogous but opposed movement of return of created beings to the One (return), driven by a longing to recapture their primal unity. Return, as described by Dionysius, is a spiritual movement towards a deeper internal awareness, or enlightenment, expressed contemplatively. The premises of the deep structure of doctrine here are essentially two: the interrelatedness of all things, and the essence of the human creature as identical with soul. The principles of Dionysian metaphysics, however, are beyond the Plotinian, and contain as crucial elements the inclinations of Athenian Neoplatonism, particularly that of Proclus.8 Here the problem of mediating the One and the Many is central and predominating. Because to relate two things is to call up a third that mediates, Dionysian philosophy is formulated in triadic structures at every point and level. Any mode of reality, once differentiated, discloses a threefold structure. Triads are not stagnant but express a dynamism that, in turn, moves through all things. Dionysius coined the term 'hierarchy' to describe the

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 83 graded levels of realities, all of which are interrelated on the cosmic level and infused with sympathetic action throughout.9 In De ecclesiastica hierarchia, for example, the sacraments, ministry and laity are all described as threefold, for example, orders of bishops, priests, and deacons, analogous to the threefold grades of three orders of angels. Also within the human, or ecclesiastical, hierarchy Dionysius describes the three stages of the soul's movement of return to the Divine Oneness as purgation (moral self-discipline), illumination (by the natural action of divine light), and union with the divine (a foretaste of the soul's eventual communion with God in heaven). Distinctive to Dionysius, perhaps as a conscious incorporation of particularly Christian principles, matter is not to be disdained or disregarded but superseded in this process. For humans, unlike those with angelic natures, it is only through the apprehension and serviceability of the material chain of being, in symbolic form, that the ascent to God is possible. It is the adaptation of Proclean concepts and terms which led observers in the late nineteenth century to determine that this author, self-identified as the Areopagite, could not have been writing at any time prior to 480 AD, and that, given the focus on monastic life and the description of certain rites as practised by the Syrian church of the time, Dionysius was a pseudonym for a late fifth-century Syrian monk well trained in the contemporaneous Hellenistic philosophic tradition. Some modern observers (beginning as early as Martin Luther)10 had gone so far as to deny that Dionysius was Christian at all, and to assert that, in fact, his Christian idiom was a thin veil for a revised but decidedly Neoplatonic system." Other scholars have accepted the Christian commitment of our eastern author while acknowledging his exploitation of a philosophic discourse that was prevalent in the elite culture of his time. The most recent insights into this debate go beyond facile categorizations, an approach I have been led to endorse. 'The distinction between Christian and pagan in the fifth century was not so much a matter of language or method as we are tempted to view it when we regard commitment to a philosophy such as Platonism as inimical to real Christianity; rather it was a matter of the convictions expressed through language by means of whatever methods were to hand/12 Intellectuals at the time of an emerging Christian world view and a waning but still dominating pagan one exhibit a range of reactions to such broad and profound changes in the mental landscape. Dionysius clearly believed that Athens had everything to do with Jerusalem since both approaches to spiritual principles, when rightly understood, could and would reveal the Truth of God. As a unitive thinker, Robert Grosseteste

84 / Candice Taylor Quinn could embrace such an approach and the revelations which were produced from it. The esteem in which Robert Grosseteste, orthodox son of the medieval church, held the Dionysian forms of thought, and the form and nature of his own translation and commentary on the work, clearly indicate that he would strongly disagree with modern assessments of Dionysius as no Christian. What is called for here, I think, is a fresh evaluation of what, for Grosseteste, would have been considered Christian and this, in turn, necessitates a shift both in our own understanding of Grosseteste's theology and the substance of orthodoxy in the mid-thirteenth century church. The abstract and almost hermetic nature of Neoplatonic discourse is well known. To express verbally spiritual truths that are beyond the apprehension of created minds, Dionysius necessarily 'tortured language' in the attempt. Even in Greek, a language suited to metaphysical verbalizations and concepts, the resulting style is Byzantine in the extreme. Cumbersome, intricately structured, and lengthy sentences render the whole consistently turgid and hyperbolic. Long formulaic phrases are repeated continuously, replete with both contrived terms and archaisms. Neologisms abound, fabricated to express what the author acknowledges is inexpressible. The use and overuse of prefixes, at first glance arbitrarily assigned (especially hyper-), lend the whole a tone of unreason and force any reading to reach beyond the literal surface. All of this renders the Dionysian corpus 'notoriously difficult to translate, as witnessed by the complete absence of any English rendition of the entire corpus into the twentieth century/13 Only with historical imagination can we speculate on the difficulties Grosseteste must have faced in his attempts to translate Dionysius into Latin, a language he acknowledges does not easily accommodate the alphabet, grammar, or syntax of Greek.14 Even more challenging for the thirteenth century translator would have been his ignorance of the Neoplatonic metaphysics and conceptualizations that the language, pushed to its limits, is meant to make plain. In spite of these obstacles, some known and some unknown to him, Grosseteste clearly felt that he, with a particular methodology, would be able to effectively transmit the mind, and therefore the wisdom and insights, of this authority to those who may not have access to the texts' native tongue. As all students of Grosseteste are aware, precise dating of many of the scholar-bishop's writings is problematic. Although there remains no doubt that the translations under review are authentically his own work, only circumstantial evidence can aid our inquiry regarding when in his career Grosseteste produced them. Since a resolution to the question of

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 85 dating bears directly on my claim that Grosseteste's theological views in large part were formed and directed by his engagement with the Dionysian texts, theorizing about chronology is necessary. D.A. Callus determined, on the basis of internal evidence and comparisons with Grosseteste's other work with Greek sources, that the Dionysian translations and commentaries were composed between the years 1240 and 1245.15 No evidence has surfaced to contradict his contention since Callus wrote, although subsequent research has attempted to date more precisely Grosseteste's work on individual books within the corpus. All agree that Grosseteste's theological writings reveal that his knowledge of Greek commenced when quotations from original Greek sources appear, circa 1230, and it remained fairly rudimentary until the early years of his episcopacy when he began to produce translations from the Greek in earnest.16 Relevant here is a brief review of some aspects of the debatable propositions concerning when and where Grosseteste studied theology.17 If Matthew Paris is to be believed on these points, Grosseteste himself claimed to be in France and to have heard the great masters of the time lecture between 1200 and the 12205, most likely during the papal interdict of England (1208-13). Informed speculation, based on internal evidence, has proposed that Grosseteste did not undertake the formal study of theology in Paris, contrary to the typical cursus undertaken by many English scholar-clerics at that time.18 A careful reading of Grosseteste's early writings and career reveals 'no sign of an interest or expertise in scholastic theology, but rather a practical concern with common problems of the confessional and the euro, animarum.'19 Just as important, however, is the number and quality of relationships Grosseteste seems to have forged with several Paris masters. These allow us to conclude that his exposure to, and interest in, the world of learning as found in Paris was much more than superficial. Grosseteste's Franciscan friend and confidant Adam Marsh reveals that his magister, Robert, was a great friend of the Victorine Thomas Callus, and that these two scholars shared a common interest in the Dionysian texts.20 Contrary to the assertions of some modern scholars, there also seems to be no compelling reason to insist that Grosseteste studied and wrote on the arts exclusively until his interests turned to theology and all considerations of natural philosophy were forever packed away, as it were.21 As I will suggest more specifically below, for Grosseteste there were two books through which human minds and hearts could attempt to know God: the book of nature and the written word of revelation. Certainly taking On the duty of the care of souls, which we know he had done as early as 1225, would serve to shift his focus and we would

86 / Candice Taylor Quinn expect his attempts to acquire more knowledge in the direction of pastoral, ecclesiological, and finally episcopal concerns and issues to come into view. But the book of nature, whether manifest in the form of the bread of the Eucharistic Host, or the generation of species, or the action of light in a rainbow, was a source of revelation for those who would peer into it looking for the very mind and will of God. Dionysian thought-forms allotted to each entity its rightful place in God's plan, including the material realm through which spiritual things may be known. If we allow that Grosseteste's theological inclinations were indeed shaped during the time when he was spending years in Paris, and that he was exposed to the Corpus Areopagiticum while there, both his interest in the arduous task of a complete retranslation of the texts and claims for a Dionysian underpinning to his theology seem more reasonable and less incongruous. This is not to minimize Grosseteste's mental predilection for seeking out the earliest sources in his attempts to elucidate and resolve particular issues, whether cosmological or ecclesiological,22 nor to dispute Grosseteste's full acceptance of the subapostolic status and authority of his author. All of these are factors in a multivalent narrative. In order, however, to explain more accurately Grosseteste's efforts towards making Dionysian notions and systems more accessible to the intellectual world he inhabited, efforts described by Sir Richard Southern as 'a sustained and many sided scholarly enterprise (which) was unparalleled in his own day and not often equalled at any time/23 we must reach beyond an appeal to external authority, or to simple curiosity, and grasp how completely and fundamentally the substance of the Dionysian synthesis resonated with and therefore served to inform and supplement Robert Grosseteste's deepest religious concerns and convictions, supplying him with a distinctive idiom with which to articulate and manifest his mind. Until recently scholars have been content to characterize Grosseteste's theology as Augustinian, and therefore as thoroughly representative of his time. This meant that Grosseteste would either work to reconcile or redefine potentially dissonant Dionysian discourse and notions within an Augustinian or western framework, or unconsciously employ a cognitive dissonance which would cause him to overlook or misread alien elements in his 'eastern' source.24 Such contentions seem to me the result of applying a genealogy of ideas approach too strictly, wherein one influence, in this case orthodox Augustinianism, dominates, and anything dissimilar must be relegated to the inconsequential, or else forcefully interpreted along predictable lines. They are also anachronistic, denying the relevant historical realities and construing within inappropriate

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 87 categories what was at that time a much more expansive appreciation of religious and spiritual realities. The pursuit of Truth was the driving force of Grosseteste's thought and his life's work. He believed that any and every instrument could and should be employed in that endeavour. Instruments wielded toward that end were necessarily multiple and manifest, while Truth was unified and hidden. Fully alive to the challenges of uncovering the Truth concealed beneath the surface of the words Dionysius employed, Grosseteste engaged both the literal reality of expression in Dionysius, and the subtextual meaning of the words lodged deeply within the mens auctoris which existed as part and parcel of God's revelation to man. Grosseteste's working assumption would have been that Dionysius and Augustine (or any of the Fathers) could not conflict or contradict one another, and it was for the seeker after Truth to understand rightly and interpret them in this light. For Grosseteste, the first stage toward apprehending spiritual reality was to recapture what the author actually said by understanding precisely and accurately the words he used. The next was to harmonize the parts, or words, into a comprehensive whole, the Truth, from which they derived. In Dionysian terms, in the human realm (as opposed to the angelic whose inhabitants are enlightened more directly), unity (God) descends into multiplicity (Creation) in the form of language and symbols, and only by means of participation in both would the soul ascend to its source and rightful place. The first phase of the process was to secure an accurate Greek manuscript copy from which Grosseteste could confidently begin his work of translating and explicating the text. MS. Canonici Gr. 97, held in the Bodleian Library, is this text, written with great care by a Latin scribe in the tenth century. Grosseteste collated this text with three other Greek manuscripts, two of which have been identified. One of the identified copies is the one sent to Louis the Pious and housed at St Denis. Since manuscripts of such antiquity and distinction would have been conserved at the Abbey with the status of relics, it has been reasonably surmised that Grosseteste, or one of his adiutores, did the work of collating and transcribing there. Corrections, variants, and subject captions are added to the Bodleian manuscript, some in Grosseteste's own hand. The copy is complete, containing all four books, the ten letters, the Prologue and scholia, epigrams and chapter headings. Also included are Eusebian extracts, a vocabulary index to the works, the Encomium of Michael Syncellus, and Methodius's account of the saint's martyrdom.25 As Grosseteste worked with this carefully made copy he also had before him all prior Latin translations, and as he acknowledged at the start of

88 / Candice Taylor Quinn his own work, he freely used the words of prior translators where to do so would facilitate his own objective of more plainly revealing the mens auctoris.26 S. Harrison Thomson's Writings lists a number of extant manuscripts containing Grosseteste's Latin translations of the Dionysian texts, which vary in reliability of witness and in content and form.27 Some manuscripts contain all four books and the letters but not the scholia; some contain only Grosseteste's commentary; others contain only the Hierarchies. Thomson discovered a total of ten manuscripts that contain the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. One of these consists only of brief excerpts, while another is not serviceable due to an overabundance of errors, omissions, and unintelligible passages. To date no other manuscript witnesses have surfaced. Some years ago I completed a diplomatic edition of Grosseteste's work on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy which comprised a collation of what I determined to be the three best manuscript witnesses.28 To date no published edition of Grosseteste on the Celestial Hierarchy has been produced, although a great deal of work on this book exists in unpublished form. In 1961, J. Stanley McQuade edited chapters 1-9 of the Celestial Hierarchy, inclusive of Grosseteste's Greek exemplar, his Latin translation, the Prologue, the scholia, and the translator's own notes.29 McQuade established the families of manuscripts, the stemma codicum, which my own work has affirmed as viable. He also showed, with regard to the manuscripts containing the Hierarchies, that Grosseteste himself translated the Prologue and scholia, which were written by Maximus the Confessor and John of Scythopolis. Some years later James McEvoy edited the remainder of the work, chapters 10-15.3° No complete edition of the Divine Names has yet seen the light of day, although selected parts have been published as sections of larger interpretive studies.31 In 1942, U. Gamba produced a critical edition of the Mystical Theology, the shortest of the four books, although he did not include the scholia.32 No manuscript yet discovered suggests that Grosseteste translated the ten letters, which in the Greek exemplars follow after the last of the four books. My own comprehensive, critical edition of De ecclesiastica hierarchia, including the Greek exemplar, is completed. Professor McEvoy continues his work finalizing the edition of De celestia hierarchia, with the intention of publishing both volumes simultaneously in the Corpus Christianorum series. My own editing efforts have been helped and hindered by a variety of circumstances. Primary among the fortuitous factors is the existence of Trinity College (Dublin) MS 163, a deluxe, precise, and meticulously produced manuscript which I have used as the base text for the critical

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 89 edition. Trinity 163 is a carefully written, moderately abbreviated work in an English Gothic script, dated by Thomson as mid-thirteenth century. The manuscript contains only the texts of the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, in that order, complete with translation, commentary, epigrammata, Prologue, scholia, and marginalia. The main text, that is, the translated words of Dionysius, appear in script twice as large as that of the commentary, which, although common practice at the time, was not prescribed, and is indicative, I think, of how Grosseteste felt about the primacy of the author's own words. The scholia appear as marginal glosses, preceeded by the phrase, 'Ex greco.' Coloration adorns initial capitals at the start of sections and chapter headings. The internal divisions are apparently Grosseteste's own since his Greek exemplar has only breaks for chapters. Corrections have been made to scribal errors, thus rendering the work complete and almost error-free. There is no contemporary ascription to Grosseteste as author or translator, but there is a later, perhaps fourteenth-century one. All this has led me to elect to replicate as closely as possible the readings of Trinity 163, against which the remaining manuscript witnesses have been compared. I have therefore retained and reproduced the nonuniform orthography of Trinity 163, typical for scribal renderings of the time, and have attempted to keep conjectural emendations, such as modern punctuation, to a minimum. It must be acknowledged, however, that Grosseteste's commentarial form and style present a considerable challenge to any system of punctuation. Very much in the style of his author, Grosseteste consistently employs long, convoluted sentences of sometimes a page or more, and these are frequently interrupted by complex parenthetical expressions, which are, in turn, often extensive enough to have their own internal logic unrelated to the surrounding expressions. At length and eventually, the commentator returns, both grammatically and conceptually, to his initial thought. In addition, this particular translation presents other more idiosyncratic problems of orthography. Scribes were asked to reproduce Greek letters (specifically, eta and omega) whenever the translator rather rigorously transliterated certain terms for which there was no Latin equivalent.33 They had varying degrees of success or failure in these attempts. Modern technology has not improved upon this situation, as I have not come across a type or font that will adequately replicate that which the scribe of Trinity 163 rather more successfully reproduced. A further set of challenges of representation present themselves, I surmise, as much for the medieval scribe as for the modern editor. Given his aim of transliterating rather than translating the text, in the tradi-

90 / Candice Taylor Quinn tional sense, Grosseteste consistently attempted to render Greek composite words into singular Latin terms (since there are no composite Latin equivalents), losing, he realizes, some sense in the translation. At the start of the Celestial Hierarchy he warns his reader, 'It must also be acknowledged that the Greeks use many compound words for which the Latin has no corresponding compounds. Thus, it is necessary for translators ... to put a number of Latin words in place of one of these compounds. Such Latin words, however, cannot express in all fullness of meaning the mind of the author in the same way that a single Greek term can. If, with the purpose of making clear the author's mind, expositors utilize the very Greek compounds themselves, preferring not to speak in Latin, they would not be doing so uselessly. It must also be realized that in Latin translation, especially in a literal one, there necessarily are many expressions which are very ambiguous and amenable to multiple meanings, which in Greek are unambiguous.'34 Putting these contrived equivalents into modern printed form, is, of course, another matter. Some seem to ally naturally, such as legis/lacio, or boni/ decenter, and so I present them that way. Others have been kept separate where their combination would tend to defy any sense, such as lucem/ductores, or holocausta/effecti, or a/deo/genitos. As mentioned, there is no early ascription in Trinity 163, though various cataloging signs are evident, a few of which suggest that this manuscript was in the collection of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh (i686-i7i6).35 The Archbishop was an avid collector of medieval manuscripts. He revealed, not suprisingly, that his primary interests lay in proving that 'these islands do not owe their first Christianity to Rome/ We do not know if the Archbishop found the content of Grosseteste's work on Dionysius contrary to his own convictions, or congenial to them. Nor do we know if Ussher had the texts of Lincolniensis in mind when he advised the keepers of Trinity College library that 'you may do well to have a care that the English popish books be kept in a place by themselves and not placed among the rest of the library, for they may prove dangerous.'36 The translation and commentary produced by Grosseteste was little used in his own day, and neglected for a long time thereafter, precisely, I think, because he does not attempt to clarify, explicate, or analyse the text for his readers along what had become traditional commentarial lines. His methodology and his goals are much more sublime. As he repeats often for the sake of emphasis, his task is to reveal the mind of the author. Certainly, this is a commonplace in medieval theoretical approaches to texts and authorship.37 But it is Grosseteste's particular

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 91 method and style of disclosing the mind of his author that gives us pause. His translation is no translatio but a transliteration verbum de verbal It was apparently the Bishop's deeply held conviction that to get to the author's intention, particularly one clothed in an alien language, the language itself, the sign or literal word, must be taken seriously and properly known. Then and only then would the objective truth behind the sign be apprehensible. By the late twelfth century Grosseteste would have had two models available to him to guide this endeavor. From the Letters of St Jerome: For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek I render sense for sense and not word for word ... I have rendered the speeches of Aeschines and Demosthenes ... not as a translator but as an orator, keeping the sense but altering the form by adapting both the metaphors and the words to suit our own idiom. I have not deemed it necessary to render word for word but I have reproduced the general style and emphasis. I have not supposed myself bound to portion the words out one by one to the reader but only to give him an equivalent in value. And I shall be well satisfied if my rendering is found true to this standard. In making it I have utilized all the excellences of the originals, the forms of expression and the arrangement of the topics, while I have followed the actual wording only so far as I could do so without offending our notions of taste. If all that I have written is not to be found in the Greek I have at any rate striven to make it correspond with it.39 From the Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor, a work that we may reasonably surmise Grosseteste knew well, comes this advice: Concerning order in expounding a text. In the exposition of a text, the order followed is adapted to inquiry. Exposition includes three things: the letter, the sense, and the inner meaning. The letter is the fit arrangement of words, which we also call construction; the sense is a certain ready and obvious meaning which the letter presents on the surface; the inner meaning is the deeper understanding which can be found only through interpretation and commentary. Among these, the order of inquiry is first the letter, then the sense, and finally the inner meaning. When this is done the exposition is complete.40 That Grosseteste clearly and consciously chose to carry out what Hugh advocated as a necessary first step in a multiform and graduated process

92 / Candice Taylor Quinn indicates his own sense of the matter. His commentary, as well, is not a paraphrase but a textual criticism in the extreme, with the result, to borrow Beryl Smalley's phrase, of something akin to 'feeding the text through a verbal mincing machine.'41 One important aspect of Grosseteste's overall objective was his intention of adding nothing to the lexicon, and therefore to the meaning his author was attempting to convey, indicating, I think, how closely Grosseteste understood these to be integrated. In this we may conclude that he was eminently successful. But his very success has led some modern observers to judge the completed work as having 'no literary value for us.'42 Grosseteste's own commentary on the text consists disproportionately of etymological word studies often in the form of definitions drawn from the Suda and/or the Lexicon Sudianum.43 Grosseteste also lists variants from the three Greek manuscripts used to make his critical edition, apparently in the belief that they too have captured and conveyed something of the author's intention. He incorporates words and phrases of prior translations only where appropriate for his purposes, as he warns us at the start of the work.44 Most importantly, and strikingly, he strives to add nothing of his own thought to that of his author. His commentary does not, accordingly, expound on the issues raised by his source, pose or answer questions brought up by the text, or develop or amplify what is presented by the author. In keeping with this approach, Grosseteste incorporates few outside sources into his commentary. He quotes the Bible, but sparingly. He refers occasionally to John Damascene, some of whose work he had recently translated, and adds passages from the Lexicon of Suda to explain obscure Greek terms or provide context. In what seems a jarring assertion at the start of a work of translation, we read Grosseteste's admonition to his audience: 'do not attempt to read and understand what I, the translator, present here unless you have more than a passing familiarity with the original (Greek) language.' It may be the case that Grosseteste's work with the Dionysian corpus has received relatively little attention from modern scholarship because he has been taken at his word: that there is nothing of the mind of the commentator in these commentaries. I would argue, to the contrary, that important dimensions of Grosseteste's thought and views are revealed in his methodological treatment of the Dionysian works. The complete accord and affinity of meaning he knows he has discovered therein discloses a great deal. No elaboration on the ideas of this authority are needed, simply an ability to see through the veil of letters to the inner truths. The bishop's procedures and the years of labor involved were attempts to facilitate this vision for others.

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 93 In the Dionysian expressions of hierarchy Grosseteste encountered a cosmology with parallels and correspondences to his own, which had been articulated explicitly years earlier, with the cosmos as possessed of an inherent order, and luciform, or light-formed.45 How well this allies with Grosseteste's light metaphysic, in which light is a privileged form of matter which gave corporeity and form to creation is evident, and may even suggest the possibility that early exposure to the Dionysian schema had a causal relationship with the substance of De luce. One example is the word 'hierarchy.' It is a term that does not appear in any other patristic literature. Dionysius formed it by fusing the terms hieros (sacred) and arche (source or principle). Hierarchy is, then, rank and order and what makes this order possible: knowledge and activity, or operatic. The goal and purpose of this arrangement is salvific, the assimilation and union of souls with the divine likeness, that is, deification. In turn, the deified creature becomes so godlike that divine activity can then flow through him and he becomes a worker, or co-worker, with God. It is particularly within De ecclesiastica hiemrchia that Grosseteste finds an articulation of the macrocosmic design to which he is expressly committed, and which provides the explanatory context for the parallel microcosmic realities of the Church Militant, namely, the orders of clerics, the sacramental mysteries, and the sacred rights and obligations of the laity. The ecclesiastical hierarchy is a manifestation of the theophany (a word Grosseteste transliterates from his Greek source) in the form of the earthly church, comprising offices, sacramental rites, and those who would seek the light. The salvific light, then, descends through the ordered rites, or sacraments, and through the clergy who perform them to those below them on the hierarchy. Dependence on the orders of hierarchy is dependence upon God, and the good soul relies absolutely on the hierarchical community that is both being saved and mediating salvation. As the hierarchic light is revealed in words and rites, and apprehended by purified and knowing souls, salvation is effected. The rites or sacraments of the church are here actually a moving outward of the divine unity into the multiplicity of spatial forms and temporal succession which is to be met by our souls, having been purged and purified, with the purpose of achieving our ultimate union with God. Symbols, rightly used by the church, are items and acts which give form (something material and therefore apprehensible by us) to something that is without form. The perceptual and material is the starting point and guide to the spiritual, and exists to evoke in human souls a movement upward (anagogic) from the realm of sense perception to that of pure intelligence, or spirit.46

94 / Candice Taylor Quinn Grosseteste's commentary on these principles shows his unqualified acceptance of them, and reveals the formation of a symbiotic relationship between the bishop's primary concerns, which were pastoral, and the Dionysian concept of the center and focus of hierarchy, which was the salvation of souls. Hierarchical procession is here more than a matter of moral virtue, although necessarily inclusive of it. It is epistemological enlightenment at a higher level by means of rightly perceiving what has been revealed. Those receiving the light apprehend the divine manifestation and are united to their source by means of the light which infuses the entire soul of the believer. Certainly, Grosseteste endorsed the Dionysian configuration which posited the first necessary phase of salvific return as 'purgation,'47 easily understood as purging the self of vice, and cleansing the soul by means of confession, absolution, and penance. Grosseteste's unified vision, informed by the unified system of Dionysius, is one in which theology and devotion, true knowledge and right action, are fused and synthesized. Good pastors purged vices, performed the sacraments, and spoke the Word to all who would hear.48 Many have remarked how pointedly Grosseteste's sermons were theological, and how emphatically his theology was, first and foremost, pastoral (as distinct from doctrinal). It is within the hierarchical scheme as articulated by Dionysius, with its attendant divine truths revealed, that Grosseteste envisioned the pastoral office, committed to the earthly church by Christ himself, as being fulfilled. Here, the sacraments serve many functions, foremost among them being to serve as a divinely established meeting place of divine work, or ritual and pastoral care, a meeting which facilitated and endorsed all of Grosseteste's theological concern, and, simultaneously, increased devotion and the drawing of human hearts and souls to God. The sacramental and human hierarchy was at once the material embodiment of God's descending love for man (transliterated by Grosseteste as philanthropia) and the vehicle of the soul's return to its source.49 Hierarchy is on one level materialized through symbols, but in actuality must be apprehended in its true form as spiritualized. In this way the whole (hierarchic) sacramental life of the church has the purpose of effecting the union of souls with God and of ensuring that any legitimate hierarchical rank or ordo necessarily hands light down to its inferiors. Hierarchic authority, or potestas, is authority thus residing with those superior in the spiritual hierarchy, as opposed to an authority invested solely in the ordo as an administrative office informed by abstract legal concepts which politicized power for the purpose of maintaining supremacy.

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 95 The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy expounds the spiritual significance of the sacramental rites and their symbols in sections entitled theoria50 which follow the descriptions of the rites. Souls which have been purged of darkness can aptly embrace the spiritual import behind the veil of the material symbols of the rites, become illuminated with the light inherent in the divine symbol, and thus be raised to God. Theologia, the writings of ecclesiastical authorities, and eloquia, the words of sacred scripture, also embody and reveal this symbolic function. Symbols are necessary for humans (as they are not necessary for angels), Dionysius asserts, because of our material nature. Symbols also convey truths which defy the precision of analytical thought. For Dionysius, theourgia ('divine work or 'operations/ Grosseteste translates, referring to the rites and their symbols) is a superior and more experientially direct form of knowing and of divine manifestation than theology, which involves reasoning one's way to divine realities. That Grosseteste enthusiastically embraced this articulation and its underlying principles should not startle us. His writings reveal his consistent inclination to privilege revelation, illumination, or spiritual seeing over systematic discussions of sacred doctrine. 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 or dialectical approach which was ultimately useful for comprehending the sensible world. But symbolic theology, the understanding of the invisible reality behind the material symbol, was hierarchically prior and superior to it. The nature of the divine light is to be hidden and indwelling, and is identified as emanating from God through every rank and order of every hierarchy. Clearly, apprehending the indwelling or immanence of God in creation is as consequential for knowing the Divine nature as is a faithful acceptance of His transcendence. In fact, at the level of the human hierarchy the immanent dimension of the Divine must be equally weighted with the transcendent, for by no other means can post-lapsarian, materially bound souls initiate the ascent to the ultimate union, ultimately desired. Within the words of his obscure source Grosseteste found the final mystery revealed, that all is one, and that the One is all. NOTES 1 Acts of the Apostles 17.34. 2 For the sake of brevity I will refer to this author henceforth as Dionysius as his pseudonymity is commonly known and accepted. For reference

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to the long-standing and continuing debate over authorial identity, see summations in Stephen Gersh, From lamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 1978); Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to their Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagus, Outstanding Christian Thinkers, ed. Brian Davies, O.P. (Wilton, CN: Morehouse, 1988). Several studies exist on the subject. The Scholia are printed in Migne, PG 4; and edited by B. Corderius. See also W. Volker, 'Der Einfluss Ps.Dionysius Areopagite auf Maximus Confessor/ in A. Stohr, ed., Universitas I (Mainz, 1960): 243-54; and Jaroslav Pelikan, 'Introduction/ Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). PL 106. 23-50; H.F. Dondaine, Le corpus dionysien de VUniversite de Paris au XHIe siecle (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1953); G. Thery, 'L'entree du Ps. Denys en Occident/ Melanges Mandonnet, vol. 2 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1930), 23-30; Raymond L. Loenertz, 'La legende parisienne de S. Denys 1'Areopagite: sa genese et son premier temoin/ Analecta Bollandiana 69 (1951), 217-37; David Luscombe, 'Denis the Ps. Areopagite in the Middle Ages from Hilduin to Lorenzo Valla/ Falschungen im Mittelalter (Hannover: Hahnsche, 1988), 133-52. '(Eriugena's) encounter with the Dionysian treatises proved formative for his own thought, and led him to Maximus the Confessor and Gregory of Nyssa. His massive Periphyseon and the subsequent commentary on The Celestial Hierarchy adapted many Dionysian themes and passed them on to the Middle Ages, especially symbolic aesthetics and the overall philosophical framework of procession and return ...' (Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius, 106). The narrative surrounding the school of the Victorines renders these developments predictable. St Victor was a house of Augustinian canons established by William of Champeaux (1070-1121), a former master at the cathedral of Notre Dame, which had acquired royal patronage. The Victorines became pastors to the students who were flocking to Paris which led to St Victor itself becoming a leading school, producing famous masters in arts, theology, and philosophy. Writings produced by Hugh and Richard also brought St Victor renown as a centre for the mystical approach to spirituality. 'Their fusion of theology and mysticism reappears in some of the greatest scholastics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ...' Frederick Artz, The Mind of the Middle Ages: An Historical Survey 200-1500 (Chicago: Knopf, 1980), 423; D. Knowles,

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11

12 13 14

'The Influence of Pseudo-Dionysius on Western Mysticism/ in P. Brooks, ed., Christian Spirituality: Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp (London: SCM Press, 1975), 79~94Cf. Dionysiaca: Recueil donnant I'ensemble des traductions latines des ouvrages attribues a Denys de I'Areopage, et synopse marquant la valeur de citations presque innombrables, ed. P. Chevallier (Paris-Bruges: Desclee, de Brouwer et Cie., 1937), 2 vol. This monumental work has included all known translations of the corpus. In each case only one manuscript is transcribed but the direct comparison provides both a diachronic and synchronic view of the known translations. The modern edition in English is Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). The critical edition of the Greek texts has appeared as Corpus Dionysiacum, vols. i and 2, ed. B. Suchla, G. Heil, A. Ritter. Patristische Texte und Studien, vols. 33, 36 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1991). Several definitive works have demonstrated this. See M. Koch, 'Proklus als Quelle des Ps.Dionysius Areopagita in der Lehre vos Bosen/ Philologus 54/1 (Neue Folge, 8/1; 1895), 43^-54; J- Stiglmayr, 'Der Neuplatoniker Proclus als Vorlage des sog. Dionysius Areopagite in der Lehre vom Ubel/ Historisches Jahrbuch 16 (1895), 253-73. '... hierarchia is first found in Denys himself and seems to be his own coinage. Hierarch, the word he habitually uses for a bishop, is a pagan word meaning "president of sacred rites, high-priest." But the word hierarchia is composed of two Greek words ... and Denys probably expected his readers to be sensitive to etymology. He is fond, anyway, of coining words with the ending -archia,' such as thearchia and taxiarchia. Louth, Denys, 38. Walter Dress, 'Hierarchie: Zur Bildung und ursprunglichen Bedeutung des Begriffs: Beobachtungen und Erwagungen/ Theologia Viatorum 13 (1975-6), 47-68. Some have shared Martin Luther's judgment, which asserted, 'Dionysius is most pernicious; he Platonizes more than he Christianizes/ adding, 'I advise you to shun like the plague that Mystical Theology of Dionysius and similar books.' A summary of these controversies is given in Maurice de Gandillac, Oeuvres Completes du Pseudo Denys L'Areopagite (Paris: Aubier, 1943), 7-22. Louth, Denys, 24. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 2. In his own notation at the start of the first book Grosseteste enumerates those particularities. He discusses Greek vowels which are not found in Latin, and dipthongs (ai, ei, oi, oy, yi) adding that he mentions these

98 / Candice Taylor Quinn

15

16

17

18 19 20 21

22

23 24

things,'... quia utile et forte necesse erit plerumque in posterum, grecas interserere dictiones, que si scribentur per grecas litteras, pauci eas legerent vel recte scriberent. Scribi autem omnino ad omnem conformitatem grece scriptionis per solas latinas litteras ut dictum est, non possunt' (J.S. McQuade, Robert Grosseteste's Commentary on the 'Celestial Hierarchy' of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite: An Edition, Translation, and Introduction of His Text and Commentary [unpublished PhD diss., Queens University, Belfast, 1961], 14-15). Callus, The Date of Grosseteste's Translations and Commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius and the Nicomachean Ethics/ Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 14 (1947), 186-210. Dionisotti, 'On the Greek Studies of Robert Grosseteste/ in A.C. Dionisotti, Anthony Graf ton, and Jill Kraye, eds., The Use of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 16 (London: Warburg, 1988), 19-39. A summation of the debate is presented by Richard Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), as is his own position; and followed up on in Joseph Goering, 'When and Where did Grosseteste Study Theology?' in McEvoy, ed., Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives on His Thought and Scholarship, Instrumenta Patristica 27 (Steenbrugge: St Peter's, 1995). McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 6-7. Goering, 'When and Where did Grosseteste Study Theology?', 50. Some time in 1241-2 Adam Marsh forwarded to Thomas Callus 'expositiones' on the Celestial Hierarchy; see McQuade, Robert Grosseteste's Commentary, 8. Southern implies that he did, whereas McEvoy gives a different chronology in which the theological works and natural philosophic works were likely produced around the same time. Southern makes this the essential character of Grosseteste's intellectual approach which, in turn, he argues, marks him out as an exclusively 'English' mind. Southern, Robert Grosseteste, 193-204. Ibid., 202. For example, '...on occasions Grosseteste hides behind the distinctive vocabulary of Dionysius on points which he may have found obscure or disconcerting ... Grosseteste was a man of his age and the philosophic and theological concerns of this century could not easily have been set aside totally ... [I]f Grosseteste had been given the choice of "siding" with either Augustine or Dionysius on the question of the mystical

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 99

25 26

27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39

40

ascent no doubt he would have chosen the Bishop of Hippo' (Dierdre Carabine, 'Robert Grosseteste's commentary on the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius/ in McEvoy, ed. Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives, 187). Ruth Barbour, 'A Manuscript of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite copied for Robert Grosseteste/ Bodleian Library Record 6 (1958), 401-16. 'Eorum qui hunc librum de graeco in latinum transtulerunt, nunc huius, nunc illius verba, raro autem admodum nostra in textu ponimus, sicut nobis visum est convenientius ad mentem auctoris declarandum.' McQuade, Robert Grosseteste's Commentary, i. Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 56-7. Candice Taylor Hogan (Quinn), Robert Grosseteste, pseudo-Dionysius, and Hierarchy: A Medieval Trinity. Including an edition of Grosseteste's translation of, and commentary on, 'De Ecclesiastica Hierarchia,' 2 vols. (unpublished PhD diss., Cornell University, 1991). See note 14 above. James McEvoy, Robert Grosseteste on the Celestial Hierarchy ofPs. Dionysius. An Edition and Translation of His Commentary. Chapters 10-15 (unpublished MA diss., Queen's Unversity, Belfast, 1967). Outlined by James McEvoy, Philosophy, Appendix A, 470. U. Gamba, ed., II commento di Roberto Grossatesta al 'De Mystica Theologia' del Pseudo-Dionigi Areopagite (Milan: Orbis Romana, 1942). See McQuade, Robert Grosseteste's Commentary, 14-15. Ibid., 15 (translation based on McEvoy, Philosophy, 80). This conclusion is based on various cataloguing signs which are marked at the start of the volume, one of which (AAA 41) is in keeping with markings from that of Archbishop Ussher's library. William O'Sullivan, 'Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh,' Hermathena 88 (1956), 56. See especially Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Wildwood House, 1988); and Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, vol. I. The Four Senses of Scripture. Tr. M. Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998). Grosseteste repeats this phrase at several key points in his own explanatory remarks. Jerome, Letters. From a Select Library ofNicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. and trans. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2nd series (Michigan, 1961), 6.113-14, and 130. Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon. In The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia

ioo / Candice Taylor Quinn

41

42

43

44

45 46

47

University Press, 1961) 91-2,120-1. The indexing system, the Tabula, of Grosseteste, compiled by him for the years prior to 1230, reveals that he knew the work of Hugh of St Victor. See the publication in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 130. Opera Roberti Grosseteste Lincolniensis, vol. i, ed. James McEvoy (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 'Tabula/ ed. P.W. Rosemann. Beryl Smalley, 'The Biblical Scholar,' in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. Daniel A. Callus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 70-97. Ezio Franceschini, 'it is the method of literal translation verbum ad verbo, carried to extreme consequences, in which the translations are only Latin clothing for limbs that remain Greek, a most precious help for the reconstruction of texts, but of no, or practically no, literary value for us, and often obscure in meaning.' Roberto Grossatesta, vescovo di Lincoln, e le sue traduzioni latine (Venice: Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, 1933), 77. 'Grosseteste was able to offer historical exegesis of Greek texts largely because he owned and used a copy of the Suda. For the Suda is in fact, not so much a dictionary as a large encyclopedia with a high proportion of biographical articles about famous Greeks, pagan and Christian. It also covers all sorts of antiquarian subjects, philosophical concepts and mythology' (A.C. Dionisotti, 'Robert Grosseteste and the Greek Encyclopedia,' in J. Hamesse and M. Fattori, eds., Rencontres de Cultures Dans la Philosophie Medievale (Louvain-la-Neuve: Universite Catholique de Louvain, 1990), 341). 'Eorum qui hunc librum de graeco in latinum transtulerunt, nunc huius, nunc illius verba, raro autem admodum nostra in textu ponimus, sicut nobis visum est convenientius ad mentem auctoris declarandum' (McQuade, Robert Grosseteste's Commentary, i. De Luce, in Baur, ed., Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln (Miinster i.W.: Aschendorf, 1912), 51-9. See a full discussion of the interaction of Dionysian thought forms with Grosseteste's ecclesiology, including how power should be righteously wielded by church officials, in my article 'Pseudo-Dionysius and the Ecclesiology of Robert Grosseteste: A Fruitful Symbiosis/ Robert Grosseteste: New Perspectives, 189-213. 'Sequitur, sacratissimi quidem, et cetera, quasi diceret, benedixi quod simbolorum composicio apparens solum ad ea que extra non est inutilis, sacratissimi quidem enim eloquiorum cantus, utpote psalmorum, et lecciones, sacratissime videlicet veteris et novi testamenti, subinducunt, seu subenarrant, ipsis, scilicet adhuc perficiendis, doctrinam virtuose vite et purgacionem, seu repurgacionem perfectam, seu omnino, perfectam corruptisice malicie ante hoc, id est ante actum vite virtuose, prior enim

Robert Grosseteste and the Corpus Dionysiacum / 101 naturaliter carencia malicie quam actus vite virtuose' (Hogan [Quinn], Robert Grosseteste, Appendix, 483-4). 48 'Secundum eundem utique deiformem modum, hoc est secundum modum divinum in utrisque theoriis precedentibus predictum, divinus ierarcha et si unitivam, seu singularem, ipsius ierarche, scilicet ierarchie, scienciam benigne, seu boniformiter, ad subiectos deponit, seu deducit, seu deorsum ducit, ille dico utens multitudinibus sacrorum enigmatum, hoc est simbolorum suboscure spiritalia significancium; et si inquam ita sit sed rursus ut absolutus, ab occupacione videlicet in rebus sensibilibus, et indententibilis minoribus. Non enim diu retinent eum minora utpote ad plebem predicacio et causarum plebis decisio et sacramentorum exterior administracio, ille inquam, sic absolutus et indententus, restituitur indiminute ad proprium prindpium, hoc est ad deum, ad quern contemplandum omnibus et totis enititur viribus et per hoc, scilicet ipse ierarcha, faciens sui ipsius eum intellectum introitum, qui introitus videlicet est, ad unum, id est ad deum. Avertendo enim se a materialibus et totis viribus enitens in deum ingreditur ad intelligendum eum. Ille inquam, sic faciens, videt pure, hoc est absque fantasmatibus, uniformes raciones, id est causas racionabiles sibi ipsis non dissonas, eorum quefiunt, id est simbolorum, ille dico faciens, terminum, seu finem, eius misericordis processus qui ad secunda, hoc est ad sacramentorum exteriorem administrationem et predicacionem ad plebem et huiusmodi earn diviniorem conversionem, que ad prima, id est ad divina et spiritalia propter que fiunt secunda et que sunt cause secundorum' (ibid., 495-6). 49 '... quod bene est assignata racio appropriacionis horum nominum communio et congregacio telete eucharistie probat per similem racionem appropriacionis huius nominis illuminacio, telete baptismi dicens, sic utique et sacram teletHn divine generacionis laudamus veram cognominacionem, hoc est secundum veram cognominacionem, illuminacionis ex eo quod fit, in ilia videlicet telete, ex hoc scilicet, quiet primum lumen tradit, et est suple, prindpium omnium divinarum ducdonum in lumen. Si enim et omnibus ierarchids, est suple, commune, hoc scilicet, tradere sacrum lumen hiis qui perficiuntur, per ipsa videlicet ierarchia; sec hec, seu ipsa, teletH et, per huius, telete videlicet baptismi, prindpalissiumum, hoc est omnium primum lumen, manducor, seu sicut habet aliud exemplar "in lucem ducor," seu illuminor ad inspeccionem aliorum sacrorum' (ibid., 465-6). 50 Grosseteste transliterates this term from the Greek and tells the reader that it is in these sections that the author attempts to plumb the mysteries he has described with his inspired mind and expose for us its spiritual, or anagogic, meaning.

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NEIL LEWIS

5 Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics

Introduction1 By the end of the twelfth century, the majority of Aristotle's writings had been translated into Latin. Twelfth-century thinkers were well acquainted with the works included in the 'old logic/ which had been available since the days of Boethius, and had written numerous commentaries on them. They had also written some commentaries on the more recently available works included in the 'new logic/ but virtually none on the libri naturales, Aristotle's writings on natural philosophy. With a few exceptions, these works began to be the subject of Latin commentaries only in the first half of the thirteenth century.2 Robert Grosseteste played an important role, as translator and commentator, in the the reception of Aristotle's works in the early thirteenth century. After learning Greek in the 12303, he went on, in the next decade, to make the first complete Latin translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, a work previously available only in a partial translation, as well as translations of parts of De caelo and Greek commentaries on these works. He also translated some minor works spuriously attributed to Aristotle.3 These activities as a translator, however, were but a late development in an engagement Grosseteste had had with the works of Aristotle since at least the 12205. Prior to learning Greek, Grosseteste had already written or commenced commentaries on a number of Aristotle's works. His commentary on the Posterior analytics - the first in the Latin West, written in the 12205 -became a standard work. Manuscripts also contain and attribute to him a commentary on the Sophistici elenchi and a detailed exposition of the Prior analytics, suggesting perhaps a project to comment on the 'new logic/ although it must be noted that the authenticity of these two works has received little study.4

104 / Neil Lewis Manuscripts also contain or attribute to Grosseteste commentaries on Aristotle's Physics. One of these works, titled Summa in viii libros Physicorum Aristotelis, is almost certainly spurious.5 But another, described in the manuscripts as Scriptum Lincolniensis super libros Physicorum or simply Lincolniensis super libros Physicorum, is authentic. Confused with the Summa in the earlier bibliographical tradition, this work is instead an edition of extensive notes Grosseteste had written in preparation for a commentary on the Physics. It also contains certain other related materials. I shall refer to it as a whole as the Notes on the Physics. Despite the importance of these notes, no printed edition of them existed until 1963, when Richard Dales, the noted Grosseteste scholar, published his edition,6 thereby throwing new light on Grosseteste's views on a range of topics in natural philosophy - including place, infinity, and measurement - and providing a deeper understanding of Grosseteste's other works, particularly De luce. This edition also shed light, more generally, on the understanding of the Physics prior to the reception of Averroes's Commentary on the Physics, a work unknown to Grosseteste when he wrote the bulk of the notes. Dales's edition was important, but unfortunately not without difficulties, which limited its value. Dales himself admitted that 'there remain several places where Grosseteste's meaning is not clear. Either a passage will not construe, or the reading of all three MSS is uncertain, or a clearly written, even corrected, passage will not make sense.' More recently, James McEvoy has noted that 'the text presents great difficulties to the reader and would need to be corrected.'7 Undoubtedly the editor of the notes faces difficulties. Some of these difficulties beset most editors of medieval philosophical works, but others are peculiar to the notes themselves. In the former connection, the manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 220, is somewhat hard to read, and all three, as is typical of manuscripts containing philosophical works, employ an extensive system of often ambiguous abbreviations. But the editor of the notes must also deal with fact that the text contained in each manuscript is of an extremely poor quality, so much so that an editor using just one manuscript could not establish anything even approaching an intelligible text without considerable guesswork. In the selection of variants stemmatic considerations are of no help, and paleographical considerations, too, are frequently of little assistance. To decide, for example, whether to use the variant contiguus or continuus, the editor must instead make a close study of Aristotle's own difficult text and Grosseteste's analysis of it. Problems are further compounded by important differences between two of the manuscripts and the Digby

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 105 manuscript. These differences are not the result of vagaries in the transmission of the text, but stem instead from the fact, I believe, that the manuscripts contain two distinct editions of the notes. Even so, a much improved and quite intelligible text of the notes can be established. Peter King and I have accordingly set out to produce a new edition accompanied by an English translation. Our task is aided greatly by the excellent critical edition of the Physica veins (the translation Grosseteste used) published in 1990 by Fernand Bossier and Jozef Brams.8 Also of great help is the edition Helmut Boese published in 1958 of the medieval Latin translation of Proclus's De motu, a work Grosseteste makes considerable use of in his notes on book 6.9 Further help is provided by quotations recently found in the works of two thirteenthcentury writers. Richard Rufus of Cornwall, I have found, uses the notes in his Oxford Sentences commentary, written ca 1250, and in his second Commentary on the Metaphysics, written before 1238. Rega Wood has also discovered use of the notes in a short question on time included in a manuscript collection of works by Adam of Buckfield. This question on time and Rufus's Sentences commentary contain verbatim quotations from the notes on book 4, quotations which, especially in the question on time, are valuable early secondary witnesses to Grosseteste's text. The Origin of the Medieval Edition/s of Grosseteste's Notes We know from William of Alnwick, the fourteenth-century Franciscan thinker, that the manuscripts containing Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics contain an edition, or editions, of notes Grosseteste had originally written down in the margins of his own copy of the Physics. In his second Determinatio William mentions material from Henry of Harclay in which Henry uses Grosseteste's views on infinity in the notes. Alnwick criticizes Henry's use of the notes.10 They merely express ideas, he claims, that Grosseteste had jotted down in the margins of his copy of the Physics in order not to forget them. These ideas express mere opinions, not claims Grosseteste would assert, as is indicated by his use of personal terms such as credo. According to Alnwick, Grosseteste did not expound the Physics itself systematically or completely, as he did the Posterior analytics. Alnwick based his remarks on his own personal observation of Grosseteste's copy of the Physics, as well as other pieces of parchment containing Grosseteste's writings, in the Franciscan library at Oxford, where Grosseteste's writings and books had been deposited after his death." There is no reason to deny that Alnwick had seen these

io6 / Neil Lewis materials, but the rest of his account is misleading. The use of personal expressions, as well as a general tentativeness of expression, characterize Grosseteste's writings and do not distinguish statements of opinion from assertion. And the notes are not mere unsystematic jottings, but were clearly intended to form the basis of a full-scale commentary on the Physics akin to Grosseteste's commentary on the Posterior analytics. A careful examination of them shows that they provide a reasonably continuous and full exposition of at least the first four books of the Physics. It is clear, however, from Alnwick's remarks that the texts in the manuscripts containing Grosseteste's notes derive from marginalia in Grosseteste's copy of the Physics. They contain, in other words, a medieval edition or editions of these marginal comments, probably prepared by Franciscans, who would have had the considerable access to the Franciscan library needed to compile them. The Circulation of the Notes When did an edition of the notes first begin to circulate? According to Richard Dales, the 'first explicit citation' of the notes 'is in Duns Scotus's Quaestiones in Physica, written probably about 1300.' These Quaestiones do use the notes, but they are neither by Scotus nor from the early fourteenth century. They must instead be dated after 1344, for they use Bradwardine's De causa Dei, which was published in that year.12 The first fourteenth-century thinker known to use the notes is instead Henry of Harclay, Chancellor of Oxford from 1313 until his death in 1317. But, as noted above, the notes were in fact being used well before the fourteenth century, indeed, as early as the 12305, in Richard Rufus of Cornwall's second Commentary on the Metaphysics. Rufus wrote this commentary before ca 1238, the date of his entry into the Franciscan order. In it Rufus paraphrases Grosseteste's account of the measurement of continua in book 4 of the notes. Parallel passages make the borrowing clear.13 Some years later, ca 1250, Rufus quotes from the notes in his Oxford Sentences commentary, referring to Grosseteste as 'expertum in numeris.'14 The notes are quoted also in a short question on time in the manuscript, London, Wellcome Library, Lat. 3, a large collection of works by the Oxford thinker Adam of Buckfield. The author of this question refers to Grosseteste as 'quidam magnus/ This question is not included among works attributed to Buckfield, and indeed escaped the notice of the cataloguer of the Wellcome manuscripts, but it seems reasonable to

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics 1107 think that it is by Buckfield.15 Buckfield was lecturing on Aristotle in the 12405, and this question, if by him, probably dates from this period.16 It is, in any event, a work of the thirteenth century, since the manuscript it is contained in is dated ca 1300. The notes were therefore being used as early as the 12305. But it is far from clear that they were in general circulation from this time. Cecilia Trifogli claims to have found no use of them in the group of Oxford Physics commentaries from ca 1250-75 that she has recently studied.17 It is conceivable that they did not circulate in the thirteenth century at all, but that Rufus and the author of the question on time had special access to Grosseteste's own handwritten copy. This suggestion, of course, is subject to correction by the results of further research into unedited British works from the thirteenth century. Even so, we may briefly note the following points in support of it. First, the quotations made by Rufus and in the question on time give a considerably better text than the extant manuscripts, and share important variants with each of the two families of manuscripts containing the notes. A simple explanation of this fact is that these quotations were carefully copied from Grosseteste's autograph, and avoided errors made by later copyists or by the original editors of the editions contained in the extant manuscripts. Second, Grosseteste did not die until 1253, and it seems unlikely that he would have allowed public distribution of the notes in their incomplete state. But he may have allowed some individuals with whom he had a close assocation to read them. We know little about Rufus's relationship with Grosseteste, but there is some reason, admittedly far from conclusive, to think that he and Grosseteste were personally acquainted before ca 1238. For we know that at some point after ca 1235 Rufus comes under Grosseteste's influence. He starts to use important works such as the Hexaemeron, De libero arbitrio, De cessatione legalium, and, as we now know, the Notes on the Physics. He refers to Grosseteste in the second Metaphysics commentary as a 'vir excellentissimus in scientiis' - a striking description, quite different from the usual 'quidam' or 'quis' by which Rufus, as well as other medieval writers, referred to their contemporaries.18 Grosseteste had made a major impression on Rufus, and Rufus had gained access to a wide range of his works. Indeed, Rufus is the first author known to quote extensively from Grosseteste's works. How is this fact to be explained? Prior to 1238, the year of his entry into the Franciscan order, Rufus was a master of arts teaching the works of Aristotle in Paris. It is conceivable that while in France he had gained

io8 / Neil Lewis access to manuscripts containing writings by Grosseteste - perhaps, as Rega Wood has suggested to me in conversation, through Franciscans attempting to recruit him to the order. Grosseteste, though not himself a Franciscan, had very close relations with the Oxford Franciscans and exercised a powerful influence on them, and it is conceivable that Rufus had been provided copies of works by Grosseteste as an enticement. Another explanation, however, is that Rufus became personally acquainted with Grosseteste at some point after ca 1235, and that his interest in Grosseteste's writings and admiration of the man himself were the product of this personal contact.19 If Rufus and Grosseteste were personally acquainted, we can envisage Grosseteste permitting Rufus, a fellow pioneer in the study of the libri naturales, to read his unpublished writings. And Rufus may well have made personal copies of material he found particularly interesting. As for the use of the notes in the question on time, if we suppose that it is a work by Buckfield, it probably dates from the 12408, when Buckfield was working as a commentator on Aristotle. Was a copy of the notes circulating in this period? Again, we do not know. What we do know is that there was a connection between Buckfield and Grosseteste. Adam Marsh recommended Buckfield to Grosseteste ca 1248-9 for the Church of Iver, describing him as a man 'quern tarn divinorum eloquiorum quant littemrum humanarum professio reddit commendabilem.' Grosseteste granted this request ca 1249-5O.20 At this time Buckfield was an important commentator on Aristotle at Oxford. Grosseteste probably knew him, and may have allowed him access to his unpublished writings. At any rate, Rufus would almost certainly have known him at Oxford, and may have provided him access to Grosseteste's notes via his own personal copies, assuming he had made such. Manuscripts Containing the Notes on the Physics Whether or not the notes were circulating in the thirteenth century, no thirteenth-century manuscripts containing them are known to exist. They survive, as far as we know, in only three manuscripts, all from the fourteenth century or later, two at Oxford and one in Venice. Here I shall offer a summary description of these manuscripts and state what we know about their provenance. The manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 220 (D), was copied, according to Lafleur, in an English hand in the early fifteenth century.21 It belonged at one point to St George's Collegiate Chapel in the royal palace at Windsor, from which it passed to the Elizabethan poet, Sir

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 109 Edward Dyer (1543-1607). The manuscript then passed to Thomas Allen (1540-1632), the noted Oxford manuscript collector. Allen bequeathed it and other manuscripts to Sir Kenelm Digby, who became its owner in 1632 upon Allen's death. In 1634 Digby donated it and other manuscripts to the Bodleian library. Besides the notes (fols. 84ra-iO5ra), D also contains Grosseteste's De forma prima omnium (the first part of Letter i) (fols. 8ira-83rb, mut in init.), Epistula Lincolniensis comitissae Wyntoniae de iudeis non molestandis (Letter 5) (f. 83rb-vb), De statu causarum (fols. I05ra-io6ra), De luce (fols. io6rb-iO7va), and De colore (f. io7va-vb); the Summa philosophiae (fols. ira-8ora; mut. in fine), wrongly attributed to Grosseteste; Albert the Great's Liber de causis (fols. io8ra-i83va); and extracts from the Divisio scientiarum of Arnulfus Provincialis (f. 183 vb-i85 va.) and from the De ortu scientiarum of Robert Kilwardby (fols. i85va-i86vb). Judging by the table of contents on the fly leaf, D once also contained materials by St Cyprian. The text of the notes in D differs importantly from that in the other two manuscripts, which belong to the same family, though neither is a copy of the other. Indeed these two manucripts, I shall argue, contain an edition of the notes distinct from that in D. The first of them, Oxford, Merton College, Coxe 295 (M), was copied, according to Powicke, in an English hand in the mid-fourteenth century. William Rede, Bishop of Chichester, once owned this manuscript.22 Two marginal notes in his hand indicate that M is a composite of two once-distinct manuscripts. According to one note, Rede purchased the first part of M before he became bishop in 1369, when he was still a master. This part contains an Expositio by Walter Burley on Aristotle's Topics (fols. ira~9orb). According to the other note, Rede purchased the second part from 'Lord Thomas Trillek, Bishop of Rochester.' Trillek became bishop in 1384, a year before Rede's death, so Rede probably purchased this part of the manuscript in 1384 or 1385. This second part contains, besides the Notes on the Physics (fols. I2ora-i3ivb; I36ra-i45ra), Grosseteste's commentary on the Posterior analytics (fols. 92ra-ii9vb), Depotentia etactu (f. i45ra-vb), and De luce (fols. I45vb-i47ra). A fragment of Vacarius's Liber pauperum (fols. I32ra-i35vb) is inserted between folios 131 and 136. M was part of a large collection of manuscripts Rede bequeathed to Merton College. The third manuscript, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. VI, 222, #2678 (V), was copied in the fourteenth century in an Italian hand, presumably in Italy from an exemplar brought over from England.23 V contains Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics (fols. 2ra~3ova) and his commentary on the Posterior analytics (fols. 3ovb-8ivb). The noted book collector Giovanni Marcanova purchased it in Padua in 1440, and

no / Neil Lewis donated it to the Augustinian canons at the monastery of St John in Viridarium in Padua in 1467. V became part of the Marciana collection in 1784.24 Although the later history of these manuscripts is, as just indicated, well documented, we know nothing about their genesis. They contain no pecia signs and virtually no marginalia, except for D, which has a few marginal notations in the first four books, apparently contemporary with the main text. The text in each manuscript is of an extremely poor quality. All these facts suggest that these manuscripts may not have been compiled for the use of serious scholars but instead for the libraries of private collectors. The Structure of the Notes on the Physics The notes consist of differing elements. It is important to realize this, since scholars sometimes refer to Grosseteste's notes or 'commentary' without distinguishing elements written at different times and for different purposes. In particular, none of the references to Averroes in the notes belong in the body of materials intended to form the basis of a commentary on the Physics; they are instead included in materials written later. The Continuous Commentary I shall call the notes for the commentary proper the 'continuous commentary/ The continuous commentary includes the bulk of the material included in the notes, with the exception, as I shall argue, of the items I go on to consider below. It is the product of Grosseteste's aim to write a commentary on the Physics along the lines of his commentary on the Posterior analytics. He takes both works to present an Aristotelian science (the Posterior analytics, a science of science), and therefore attempts to identify in each case the demonstrated conclusions of that science. And he does in fact provide, as he sees it, an almost complete list of the demonstrated conclusions of the Physics,^ although his exposition of the arguments for these conclusions and of the text surrounding them is far from complete after the fourth book. The continuous commentary, like the Commentary on the Posterior analytics, consists largely of an exposition of Aristotle's thought. It does not contain formal cjuaestiones with arguments pro et contra of the sort often found in later commentaries. But it does contain important digressions where Grosseteste presents his own views on issues raised by Aris-

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 111 totle. The most important digressions of this kind concern chance and providence, the immobility of place, infinity, and the measurement of continua.26 These digressions flow smoothly from the surrounding text and clearly form an original and integral part of the continuous commentary. But other parts of the notes, common to all manuscripts, seem to be neither expositions of Aristotle's text nor digressions of this kind. Definitate motus et temporis The most important of these is at the end of the continuous commentary on book 8. The continuous commentary on this book is incomplete. Grosseteste begins it with a list of the conclusions of the book (something not done in earlier books), and then turns back to work through the text, conclusion by conclusion. He gets no further, however, than a long and incomplete exposition of the arguments for the second conclusion that some things are always immobile, some always in motion, and some sometimes in motion and sometimes at rest (8.3., 253a28).27 The exposition of this part of the text is concerned chiefly with selfmotion, yet it breaks off abruptly and is immediately followed by material with a quite different subject matter.28 In this material, which begins with the words 'perpetuitas motus/ Grosseteste instead discusses Aristotle's arguments in book 8.1 of the Physics. He claims that Aristotle argues here not for the view that motion is perpetual in the sense that there is motion at every time, but for the heresy that motion, like time and the world, is infinite and without a beginning in the past. Grosseteste expounds Aristotle's arguments for this view, offers refutations of them, and then diagnoses what led Aristotle to make them. This material does not exist only in the Notes on the Physics. It is also found, quite independently of the continuous commentary, in the manuscript Prague, National Museum xii.E.5 (P), and, in a shorter form, in four other manuscripts, sometimes under the title Definitate motus et temporis, a title I shall use more broadly to refer to both versions.29 The longer of these versions appears to have been written first, the shorter being an abridgement, as Dales argued, and, judging by its variants, an abridgement of the longer version as it appeared in a family of manuscripts to which D belongs. I suspect that this abridgement was made in the fourteenth century, as the earliest manuscript known to contain it dates from after ca 1350; no use of it is known.30 The longer version, on the other hand, was known as early as the 12503, for, as Richard Dales has shown, it is quoted in the Oxford Sentences Commen-

112 / Neil Lewis tary of Richard Rufus of Cornwall, ca 125O.31 Rufus also uses parts of the continuous commentary on book 4 in this work, as we have seen, which suggests that he drew from a manuscript containing both it and De finitate - perhaps, as suggested above, from Grosseteste's own copy of the Physics. Was De finitate an original part of the continuous commentary? If it was, it must have been a continuation of the discussion of book 8.1 which has been displaced in the extant manuscripts containing the notes. Now Grosseteste's discussion of 8.1 is short - surprisingly short, given his well-known attacks on Aristotle's views on the eternity of the world.32 He fails to make it clear that he understands Aristotle to hold not just that time and motion have always accompanied one another, but that they are infinite and without a beginning in the past. In fact, he does not discuss Aristotle's arguments at all. Yet he had already briefly mentioned them in book i and indicated his disagreement with Aristotle: 'All the philosophers who could not attain to the simplicity of eternity held that before each time and before each motion, time and motion had preceded, and thus that infinite time had preceded, just as Aristotle holds in book 8.'33 De finitate does discuss Aristotle's arguments, and in considerable detail. It fills nicely the lacuna in the continuous commentary's exposition of book 8.i.34 Yet there are good reasons to deny that De finitate once formed part of the continuous commentary on book 8. In the first place, as Richard Dales notes, at one point in De finitate Grosseteste writes: 'Intentio igitur Aristotelis in prima conclusione sua in 8"° Physicorum est una istarum trium.' As Dales points out, if De finitate had formed a part of the continuous commentary, why would Grosseteste 'suddenly have felt obliged to identify the work he was commenting on?'35 Furthermore, De finitate uses Averroes's Commentary on the Physics. Indeed, Grosseteste interweaves close paraphrases of material from this commentary into his own exposition of Aristotle's arguments.36 If De finitate originally formed part of the continuous commentary on book 8, we would expect to see the influence of Averroes's commentary elsewhere in the notes on book 8, which we do not. In fact Averroes's Commentary on the Physics is used nowhere in the continuous commentary. De finitate was therefore written after the continuous commentary and did not form an original part of it. But since Richard Rufus quotes both it and the continuous commentary, and it is included in all manuscripts containing the continuous commentary, it seems plausible to think that Grosseteste had written it out in his own copy of the Physics after he had written the notes for the continuous commentary. The

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 113 character of Definitate suggests that it was composed as a self-contained response to those who claimed that Aristotle had not really argued for a beginningless past.37 A Passage Containing a Quotation from Richard Rufus of Cornwall

A third item distinct from the continuous commentary is a short passage at the end of the longer version of De finitate in the notes and P.38 Whether this material originally formed part of Definitate is unclear. It is not present in the abridged versions, but it is present in all three complete manuscripts (DMV). To my eyes, at least, it makes a somewhat abrupt transition from the preceding text, but it is related in subject matter. This passage refers to a 'Magister Richardus de Sancto Victore' and includes an argument for the finiteness of past time allegedly drawn from his works. But the argument is not from Richard of St Victor. Instead, it is from Richard Rufus of Cornwall, in whose Oxford Sentences commentary it is found verbatim.39 This short passage raises difficult questions. In the first place, although it contains an argument found verbatim in Rufus's Oxford Sentences commentary, which was written ca 1250, in that commentary, as we have seen, Rufus himself quotes from Definitate. It is natural to think, then, that someone who had read Rufus's commentary - perhaps Grosseteste - added this material to Definitate after ca 1250. Definitate itself, judging by its close parallels with the Hexaemeron and its use of Averroes's Commentary on the Physics, appears to be a work of the 12305, as Dales argued.40 Yet Rega Wood has pointed out to me that the reference to a Master Richard does not fit with this hypothesis. Richard Rufus had been a Franciscan since 1238, and had achieved considerable fame by 1250. Grosseteste would certainly have known of him in the 12503 and referred to him as Prater, not 'Master/ An alternative explanation must account for the manuscripts' use of the term 'Master.' Professor Wood has suggested an alternative explanation to me. She notes that Rufus habitually recycled materials. The material containing the reference to Master Richard may therefore stem originally from a work Rufus had written before 1238, and Grosseteste may have had access to this material when he wrote Definitate. And if this is so, the quotation from Rufus may well have formed an original part of De finitate. This is an attractive hypothesis, yet it faces two problems. In the first place, the reference is not simply to a 'Master Richard.' The manuscripts instead refer to 'Master Richard of Saint Victor,' a twelfth-century

114 / Neil Lewis thinker. If Grosseteste was directly quoting from Rufus's works, and knew they were Rufus's works, the reference to Saint Victor must not have been present in his autograph. This can be readily explained, however, if we suppose that someone in the Franciscan library at Oxford added this reference to Grosseteste's autograph as a marginal annotation, which later editors, taking it to be a correction, incorrectly incorporated into the body of the text. The second problem is raised by the manuscript P. In this manuscript, and this manuscript alone, the material referring to Master Richard is followed by a paragraph starting with the following words: 'Haec scripsit quidam, qui addidit quod ratio Richardi non oportet sic retorqueri adfuturum sicut ad praeteritum.'^ What are we to make of this remark? If we take the express 'haec scripsit' to refer solely to the argument quoted from Rufus, this remark is a fair description of the material in the preceding passage, since the passage does go on to say that the argument should not be applied to the future. One hypothesis, then, is, as Richard Dales appears to have thought,42 that this material in P is in effect a later summary of the preceding material by someone other than its author. Just why such a summary was added, or even thought necessary, is unclear, since the point it makes, so interpreted, is obvious to the reader. The other possibility is that this material in P is by the same author as the text that precedes it, and that in fact 'haec scripsit' refers to all the material preceding it - both the argument from Rufus and the comments on it - and that the author of the continuation in P is claiming that he had seen a longer discussion in which all this material was included. The former hypothesis, according to which the continuation in P is not by Grosseteste, allows us to hold that the material preceding the continuation in P was by Grosseteste, and that he had in fact had direct access to some material by Rufus. The latter hypothesis, however, would mean that both the continuation in P and the material immediately preceding it were by the same author. If this author was Grosseteste, he must have been quoting from Rufus at second hand. Yet another possibility is that the verb scripsit refers not to the author of the preceding material at all, but to the scribe who copied it. It is conceivable, for example, that in the manuscript from which P was copied the scribe had added a marginal note to the effect that Rufus's argument should not be applied to the future. The copyist of P had seen such a note in his exemplar, and, realizing that it did not belong to Grosseteste's text but thinking it useful in any case, had mentioned to the reader its contents. Given the range of possibilities just mentioned, we simply cannot be sure, one way or another, whether Grosseteste had directly read materials by Rufus in the 12305.

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 115 Materials Peculiar to D With the exception of the passage in p just considered, the materials considered so far are in all manuscripts containing Grosseteste's notes. But D also contains items present in neither M nor V. Two of these items are short notes embedded within the continuous commentary. The first, on fol. 84ra, is a cross-reference to book i of the commentary on the Posterior analytics. A marginal note 'non de littera' indicates that it did not originally belong to the continuous commentary but was incorrectly inserted into it. The second (fol. 96vb) is a short passage in book 4 explaining the notion of a rational line. It too appears to be an interpolation made into the text.43 Dales, correctly in my view, omitted these items from the text of his edition. But he included in his text a third item peculiar to D's text of book 7 (fols loivb-iozra), and, like D itself, made no break between it and the preceding text. This material, which starts with the words 'motiva theriaca operatur/ is, however, not a part of the continuous commentary on book 7. It is a note on the attractive powers of medicines based on Avicenna's Canon, presumably included with this part of the continuous commentary because of its relation in subject matter to the discussion in book 7 of the attractive power of magnets. This note occurs after the completion of the continuous commentary on book 7, as is indicated by the fact that Grosseteste had concluded his remarks on book 7 before it, summing up the remainder of the book with the words: 'In fine huius libri nititur probare quod si potentia est aequalis potentiae, et motus est aequalis motui, ideoque ad intelligentiam illius ostendit quis motus cui motui comparatur et quis non.' Book 6 ends in an equally terse fashion. In addition, this note refers expressly to Averroes's Commentary on the Physics, while the continuous commentary shows no sign of Averroes's influence. So this note was added after the continuous commentary had been written. The nature of the note suggests that Grosseteste may well have written it, as he had an interest in medical matters and elsewhere refers to Avicenna's Canon.44 It was perhaps originally written on one of the pieces of parchment Alnwick mentions having seen, added to the continuous commentary by the editor of the edition of the notes in D, but not by the editor of the edition in MV. The Dating of the Continuous Commentary The dating of the continuous commentary is important not just for the chronology of Grosseteste's writings, a chronology still far from settled, but also for the history of the reception of the Physics. If the continuous

n6 / Neil Lewis commentary was written before ca 1230, it was the earliest substantial account of the Physics, if not published commentary, written in the Latin West. If at least some parts of it were written after 1230, they might be contemporary with, or even later than, the first published Latin commentary on the Physics, written by Richard Rufus in Paris ca 1235.45 Now scholars agree that the continuous commentary was started no earlier than ca 1220, and that it was written over a period of time.46 They also agree that the bulk of it stems from the 12205. But some scholars have wished to date at least some parts of it in the 12305. Such a dating of even parts of it is far from obvious, and I wish to mention some considerations here aimed at removing obstacles to dating the whole of the continuous commentary in the 12205. In particular, I want to make two points. First, if we are to claim that parts of the continuous commentary were written in the early 12305, we must also hold that Grosseteste only had use of Averroes's Commentary on the Physics at a later date. This indeed is the view of both Dales and McEvoy, who propose a later dating of parts of the continuous commentary, and both claim that Grosseteste only had access to Averroes's commentary ca 1235. But, I wish to suggest, there is no good evidence to support this claim, and some evidence instead to suggest that Grosseteste had use of the Commentary on the Physics early in the 12305. The second point is that the particular arguments that have been offered for dating specific parts of the continuous commentary after 1230 are in fact quite weak. When Did Grosseteste First Use Averroes's Commentary on the Physics? The continous commentary must have been written before Grosseteste had use of Averroes's Commentary on the Physics, as it makes no use of this work, a work we should expect Grosseteste to have used if he had had the opportunity to do so. Yet there is little solid evidence to think that Grosseteste only had use of Averroes's commentary after ca 1235. Dales and, it would seem, McEvoy too, rely on the claim, based on De Vaux's seminal article, that the Commentary on the Physics was not available in Latin translation until ca 1235. But Gauthier, the preeminent contemporary student of the reception of Averroes's works, has challenged this claim, suggesting that this work was translated into Latin at some point between 1224 and 123O.47 It might be thought, however, that Grosseteste's first use of Averroes's commentary was contemporary with his extended use of it in De finitate, and that the dating of this work will serve to determine when Grosseteste first had

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 117 access to Averroes's commentary. I agree that Grosseteste's composition of De finitate and first contact with Averroes's Commentary on the Physics probably occurred at about the same time. But now our concern turns to the dating of De finitate. Dales and McEvoy date it ca 1235 or even a little later, because of its use of Averroes's Commentary on the Physics and its close parallels with the Hexaemeron.48 The former reason of course depends on the question of when Averroes's work was first used by Grosseteste, which we have seen to be a matter of dispute. And the latter reason has little force, since, even assuming that the Hexaemeron dates from ca 1235, similar close textual parallels exist between it and other works that date from ca 1230 or earlier, notably De liberv arbitrio, a work probably written by ca 1230, and indeed also material from book i of the continuous commentary itself.49 In fact Grosseteste, like other authors, medieval and modern, was not averse to reusing material, and given this the presence of such textual parallels provides a slender basis for relative dating. Dales himself seems to have thought that the nature of the textual parallels in question indicated that parts of De finitate "appear to be revisions' of the Hexaemeron, but I must admit that this hardly strikes me as obvious. Instead the passages Dales thinks are revised in De finitate are much more naturally understood as paraphrases of results already obtained in De finitate; similarly, the material quoted from De libero arbitrio is a paraphrase of results already obtained in De libero arbitrio. In sum, I know of no good reason to think that De finitate, or Grosseteste's first use of Averroes's Commentary on the Physics, must be as late as ca 1235. There is, moreover, some positive reason to think that Grosseteste did use Averroes's commentary early in the 12303. The note on medicine found in D uses this commentary, and refers to 'Averroes, commentator Philosophi, videlicet Aristotelis.'50 The need to make clear the identity between Averroes and the Commentator, the Philosopher and Aristotle suggests, as McEvoy has observed (not realizing that it weakens his argument for dating De finitate as late as ca 1237) that this note was written at a point in time when confusion was likely.51 In particular, although 'the Commentator' came to denote Averroes exclusively later in the thirteenth century, and indeed, it would seem, later in the 12305, it did not do so in the first years when Averroes's works were starting to circulate. So this note seems to derive from early in the 12305, perhaps even earlier if Gauthier is correct. If it was written by Grosseteste, he had probably read Averroes's Commentary on the Physics by the early 12305, and the whole continuous commentary should probably be dated to the 122OS.

n8 / Neil Lewis Do Parts of the Continuous Commentary Date from the Early 12305? Richard Dales and Sir Richard Southern have also provided arguments for dating quite specific parts of the continuous commentary in the 12305. According to Dales, a passage in book 3 of the continuous commentary makes a cross-reference to Grosseteste's De motu corporali, which he dates ca 1231-2, and was therefore written after ca 1231. However, this cross-reference is not to De motu corporali, but to Aristotle's De caelo, 1.3, 269b3o.52 Sir Richard Southern, in turn, suggests that book 5 of the continuous commentary dates from ca 1232-5 for, although it does not itself quote Averroes, it 'expounds a doctrine of light and colour in words which show a close relationship with his late treatise De colore, which does quote Averroes/53 The dating of De colore ca 1232-5 is in fact doubtful, and several manuscripts containing it do not include the reference to Averroes. But, setting this to one side, Southern's reference to a 'doctrine of light and color' is misleading. All that is pertinent in the material to which Southern refers is a definition of whiteness as 'lux multa clara et incorporata in perspicuo puro.' This definition does occur in De colore, but it is simply an instance of a general conception of colour as embodied light that Grosseteste had already stated in the commentary on the Posterior analytics,54 which scholars date from before 1230. It strikes me as unlikely that Grosseteste would have acquired this general conception, but only learned of its particular applications some years later. We would expect, rather, that both the general conception and particular applications were present in the same source. Finally, Southern suggests that book 6 of the continuous commentary may date from after 1235 because of its use of Proclus's De motu or Elementatio physica. He notes that book 6's 'peculiar feature is that it is entirely occupied with a comparison between Proclus's and Grosseteste's division of Aristotle's conclusions in this book. When Grosseteste became familiar with Proclus's work is wholly unknown, but it is more likely to be late than early.'55 There are reasons, however, that suggest instead that Grosseteste is more likely to have become acquainted with De motu earlier rather than later. The Latin translation of Proclus's De motu that circulated in the middle ages was almost wholly an outline of the conclusions and arguments of book 6 of the Physics. This material was translated from Greek into Latin in Sicily, probably in the twelfth century, by the same translator who translated Euclid's Data and Optica and the pseudo-Euclidean Catoptrica or De speculis,56 as it is usually titled in medieval works. We know little about the transmission of the Latin

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 119 translation of De motu. Its editor, Helmut Boese, identifies seven manuscripts containing it, the earliest of which, he states, was copied in Italy in 1243. Boese does not list the full contents of these manuscripts, but it turns out that in at least one of them - Dresden, Sachsische Landesbibliothek, Db 86 - De motu is contained along with the aforementioned Euclidean works and the pseudo-Euclidean De speculis.57 So manuscripts circulated containing both De motu and the Euclidean works. Now Grosseteste himself frequently refers to De speculis in his scientific works, and uses it in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics, and perhaps also in book 2 of the continuous commentary on the Physics.58 This suggests that he may have had De motu in his possession from the 12205, in a manuscript containing the Euclidean works, but only found use for it some years later when he turned to the particularly difficult book 6 of the Physics. In sum, there is little evidence to suggest that Grosseteste only had access to Averroes's Commentary on the Physics after ca 1235; there is also little reason to date Definitate as late as ca 1235. The positive arguments for dating parts of the continuous commentary in the early 12305 are also weak. So if we date most of the continuous commentary in the 12203, there is no good reason not to date all of it in this period. Such a dating is attractive also given the fact that Grosseteste's career took a major turn around 1230, when he resigned his secular teaching position and accepted the position of first teacher of the Oxford Franciscans. The early 12303 see a shift toward a greater concern with theology, especially pastoral theology and biblical exegesis. We also know that by the time he wrote his Hexaemeron Grosseteste was critical of the corrupt Latin text of the Physics.59 His study of Greek in the 12305 - perhaps even in the late 122OS, if some recent scholarship is correct60 - may have convinced him that a full-scale commentary on the Physics required a careful study of the original Greek text, and he may have had neither the inclination nor opportunity to undertake this. And if, as I have suggested, he had access to Averroes's Commentary on the Physics by the early 12305, he almost certainly would have realized that Averroes would have to be considered in a commentary on the Physics and that this would require a complete overhaul of his preliminary notes, something for which, again, he may have had little time or inclination. Uses of the Notes Several of the most important thinkers associated with Oxford used Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics. The first we know of, as noted above,

12O / Neil Lewis is Richard Rufus of Cornwall, who uses the notes in his second Commentary on the Metaphysics, probably written in Paris before 1238. Around 1250 Richard also used the notes in his Oxford Sentences commentary; the author of the short question on time, probably Adam of Buckfield, may have used them around the same time or a little before. The next thinker known to use the notes is Henry of Harclay in a question Utrum mundus poterit durare in aeternum a parte post, disputed before 1317. He is the first thinker known to use them in the fourteenth century. After ca 1324 Walter Burley makes considerable use of the notes in an exposition and questions on the Physics. John Holcot briefly refers to the notes in his Quaestiones on the Sentences, written ca 1331-3, and after 1344 the notes are used in a Physics commentary spuriously attributed to Duns Scotus. Finally, John Wyclif, a great admirer of Grosseteste, uses them in a number of works dating from after ca i^>6^.6'1 I shall argue below that the manuscripts M and V contain a different edition of the notes than does D. Do the uses of the notes just discussed provide evidence about which edition was more commonly used? To answer this we must turn to quotations from the notes. Now the quotations from the notes made by Wyclif and the anonymous author of the Physics commentary simply do not serve to indicate an affinity with one manuscript tradition, and hence edition, rather than another, and in Holcot's case there is reason to doubt that he had even read the notes. He does not quote from them, but simply states what, at the time, was probably well known at Oxford: that Grosseteste had proposed a doctrine of unequal infinities in the notes.62 He could easily have learned this from reading Harclay, Alnwick, or Burley. The quotations made in the thirteenth century, as I have indicated above, parallel neither family of manuscripts closely. Sometimes they share important variants with one, sometimes with the other. I have suggested above that this might be because they were made directly from Grosseteste's autograph. In any event, they provide no evidence that one, as opposed to the other, if either, of the editions copied in the fourteenth or fifteenth century was being used in the thirteenth century. The only quotations, then, in our present state of knowledge, that allow us to determine the use of one as opposed to the other of the medieval editions are those found in Burley and Harclay, and their quotations indicate quite clearly that they were using a manuscript in the same family as M and V, although neither M nor V themselves. This fact, combined with the fact that the only manuscript known to contain the other edition dates from the fifteenth century, suggests that it was the edition in MV that circulated most widely.

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 121 Editing the Notes In the introduction to his edition, Richard Dales notes, correctly I believe, that sometimes the two manuscript families represented by MV and D 'differ so radically that they appear to represent two independent attempts to edit Grosseteste's notes.'63 Now to show that the manuscripts MV and D contain different editions of the notes, it is not enough to point out variations, even significant variations, between them. The nature of the variations in question is crucial. A given text may diverge quite widely from manuscript to manuscript. Often such variations are explicable in terms of copyists' errors. In other cases a copyist may have 'improved' the text, perhaps by substituting one word for another, or by rewriting an obscure sentence to make its meaning clearer, or by substituting for quotations the author has made quotations drawn from his own texts of the authorities in question. Variations of these kinds are not surprising and are found between MV and D. But the differences between MV and D are nevertheless so pervasive and of such a nature as to indicate that these manuscripts belong not just to different families but represent two distinct editions of the notes. To demonstrate this point would require a close examination of a wealth of manuscript material, which I cannot do here. Some indication of the variations in question has already been given by Richard Dales in his edition.64 Here I shall simply give a brief description of their nature. In the first place, MV and D vary considerably in the parts of the continuous commentary that include lemmata drawn from Aristotle's text. The wording of the lemmata, their length and presence, as well as the text directly surrounding them all differ in ways not readily explicable in terms of scribal intervention. In this respect they contrast with other parts of the text, where variations between the manuscripts are usually readily explicable in terms of scribal intervention. As an example consider a typical case drawn from book 5: MV Tertio ibi quare necesse est ex his quae dicta sunt tres esse mutationes, ostendit omnes mutationes esse tres, cuius demonstratio est satis patens. D Tertio ostendit omnes mutationes esse tres, cuius demonstratio patet, ibi: quare videtur est ex his.

Differences of this kind, and many rather more substantial, pervade the continuous commentary. Occasional differences of this sort would not be surprising, but their presence throughout the text suggests they may

122 / Neil Lewis have arisen from difficulties in interpreting Grosseteste's original handwritten notes, and thus stemmed from the efforts of different editors, rather than from scribal intervention in the manuscript tradition. Grosseteste had probably not written out the lemmata now included in the notes, but instead tagged the text of the Physics in some manner (perhaps by underlining), and this may have led to a lack of clarity over the relation between his notes and the text. He may also have left the comments introducing lemmata in an undeveloped state, planning to fill them out later. In MV conclusions of the text and the accompanying lemmata are standardly introduced by the formula: n° ibi + Aristotle's text + etc. ostendit (or demonstrat). But this pattern is much less common in D. The transposition of text also suggests that MV and D contain different editions. All three manuscripts jumble the text up to some degree, assuming that Grosseteste intended the conclusions and lemmata he identified to follow the order of Aristotle's text. In some cases these transpositions are common to all three manuscripts. In other cases MV differ significantly from D and more often than not give a more coherent ordering of the text than D, which at times transposes material as much as a whole column away from the text it directly, and correctly, follows in MV.65 These transpositions, like the variations of text involving lemmata, may have resulted from difficulties editors found in interpreting a mass of handwritten notes in the margins of Grosseteste's copy of the Physics. Finally, D incorporates materials lacking in MV. Some of these materials may, as suggested above, be additions made by scribes or readers at some point in the manuscript tradition of D, but the long note on medicine appears to have been written by Grosseteste. It was perhaps the contents of one of the scraps of parchment Alnwick mentions having seen, possibly inserted between the leaves of Grosseteste's copy of the Physics and included by one of the editors of the notes along with the text of book 7. The fact that Grosseteste's notes survive in two medieval editions complicates the modern editor's task. It cannot simply be described as that of editing the notes, for the extant manuscripts present two distinct editions of the notes. Is the editor then to edit one medieval edition as opposed to the other, or instead to construct a composite edition, not intended as such to present to the modern reader one of the medieval editions? There is no fully satisfactory answer. An edition of the notes is likely to appeal not only to readers with an interest in Grosseteste's thought or medieval thought in general, but also to those interested in the reception of Aristotle's thought and the use of Grosseteste by later

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 123 authors. The latter audience may find it preferable to have available an edition of the text or texts actually used by later medieval thinkers. The former audience may not find this important, so long as the modern edition captures as clearly as possible Grosseteste's own thought, and for an edition to do this it may need to diverge from the medieval editions. Inevitably a modern edition directed at both audiences will contain an element of compromise. We have available, however, a medieval edition - that contained in MV - which, as indicated above, appears to have been more widely used than the other and is better in that it provides a more coherent ordering of Grosseteste's remarks relative to Aristotle's text and a more systematic and coherent numbering of conclusions and use of lemmata. That is, MV contain a better edition from a structural point of view than D. An edition based in its structural aspects on MV rather than D will provide a more coherent presentation of Grosseteste's interpretation of the Physics as well as a text which, structurally at least, is closer to the text used by most medieval thinkers. Yet although MV offer a structurally better edition than D, both manuscripts are filled with errors, especially M. To be sure, D is also of very poor quality in this respect, but it remains crucial for establishing a coherent text in the parts of the text where the divergences appear due to scribal intervention rather than editorial differences.66 The modern editor is best advised to construct an edition that closely follows the structure found in MV and their presentation of lemmata, making only such minimal modifications in these regards as are needed to provide a coherent text. But this edition must make considerable use of D also, especially in those large parts of the notes in which the variances between the texts found in MV and D are due not to the medieval editors but to copyists' errors or other forms of contamination. The result of such an approach will be an edition that diverges quite considerably from the edition published by Richard Dales. Dales took the manuscript D to provide a better text, not just in the case of individual variants, but also structurally. Accordingly, he noted that with the exception of the beginning of book 2, 'D provides the accepted text in all places' (In Phys, xxxii). In our view this incorrect assumption is responsible for a number of the deficiencies in Dales's edition. For detailed justification of this claim, however, the reader must await the publication of our edition. The moral of these remarks, then, is that the editor of the notes should work on two levels, using MV to provide the structure of the edition the lemmata, material introducing them, and numbering of conclusions

124 / Neil Lewis - but appealing to D also for the selection of variants, in particular in the parts of the text in which divergence between the manuscripts is readily attributable to scribal shortcomings. NOTES 1 I am indebted to Professor Rega Wood, with whom I have had many conversations, reflected in my discussion below, regarding the question of the relationship between Grosseteste and Richard Ruf us of Cornwall. Professor Wood has also been kind enough to let me read her unpublished transcriptions of numerous works by Rufus, which has led to discoveries, noted below, of Rufus' use of Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics. I would also like to thank Professor Peter King, my collaborator on our edition of the Notes. 2 There may have been a few exceptions. J.K. Otte, for example, argues that a commentary on Aristotle's De generatione had been written at Oxford before 1174. See 'An Anonymous Commentary on Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione,' Traditio 46 (1991), 326-36. 3 See The Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle in the Latin Translation of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (11253) H.P.F. Mercken, ed., 2 vols. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1973,1991); Pseudo-Andronicus de Rhodes. IlepircaOcov,A. Glibert-Thirry, ed. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1977); D.J. Allen, 'Mediaeval Versions of Aristotle's De caelo and of the Commentary of Simplicius,' Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1950), 82-120; Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235-1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 67-70. For the transmission of Aristotle's works, see E.G. Dod, 'Aristoteles Latinus,' in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzmann et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 45-79. For Grosseteste's study of Greek, see Dionisotti, 'On the Greek Studies of Robert Grosseteste,' in A.C. Dionisotti, Anthony Grafton, and Jill Krage, eds., The Use of Greek and Latin: Historical Essays, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 16 (London: Warburg, 1988), 19-39, and J. McEvoy, 'Robert Grosseteste's Greek Scholarship: A Survey of Present Knowledge/ Franciscan Studies, 56 (1998), 255-64. 4 For the commentary on the Posterior analytics, see P. Rossi, ed., Robertus Grosseteste: Commentarius in Posteriorum analyticorum libros (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1981). The commentary on the Sophistici elenchi, found in the manuscript Oxford, Merton College 280, is briefly described in S.

Robert Grosseteste's Notes on the Physics / 125

5

6

7 8 9

10

Ebbesen, 'OXYNAT: A Theory about the Origins of British Logic/ in The Rise of British Logic, ed. P.O. Lewry (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 1-17, at 6. The exposition of the Prior analytics is found in two fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts: Chicago, University of Chicago UL 968, and Modena, Biblioteca Estense, lat. 54. See Roberto Grosseteste, Snma de los ocho libros de la Fisica de Aristoteles (Summa Physicorum), texto latino, traduccion y notas de J.E. Bolzon y C. Lertora Mendoza (Buenos Aires, Eudeba: Editorial Universitaria, 1972) (this work contains the Latin text of the 1552 Venice edition). Roberti Grosseteste Episcopi Lincolniensis Commentarius in VIII libros Physicorum Aristotelis, R.C. Dales, ed. (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 1963) (= In Phys.). Dales's introduction to his edition contains a great deal of useful information I have been unable to consider in this paper. Thomson, Writings, 258, also notes a commentary on the Physics attributed to Grosseteste in Oxford, Bodleian Library, e Museo 230, with the colophon: 'Explicit optimum opus super octo libros Physicorum secundum Lincolniensem.' Thomson argues convincingly for its inauthenticity. I base the claim that no printed edition of the notes existed before 1963 on Thomson, Writings, 82. In Phys., xxx; McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 482. Physica: Translatio veins, F. Bossier and J. Brams, eds., Aristoteles Latinus 7.1 (Leiden-New York: EJ. Brill, 1990). Die mittelalterliche Ubersetzung der ZTOIXELGSIS QTSLKH des Proclus. Prodi Diadochi Lycii Elementatio Physica, H. Boese, ed. (Berlin: AkademieVerlag, 1958). Dales seems to have been unaware of this work, for he makes reference only to the Greek text of Proclus. Alnwick writes: 'Ad dictum domini Lincolniensis dicendum est primo quod hoc non dicit assertive sed opinative. Unde utitur verbo credendi et opinandi: credo, inquit, et puto et cetera. Secundo est sciendum quod ilia verba dominus Lincolniensis scripsit manu sua in margine libri Physicorum, quern non studiose nee complete exposuit sicut librum Posteriorum. Sed quando aliqua imaginatio notabilis sibi occurrebat ibi scripsit ne laberetur a memoria sua, sicut et multas schedulas scripsit quae non omnes sunt authenticae. Non enim est maioris auctoritatis quae dissute scripsit in margine libri Physicorum quam aliae schedulae quas scripsit, quae omnia habentur Oxoniae in libraria fratrum minorum, sicut oculis propriis vidi. Unde quamvis dicta domini Lincolniensis quae authentice scripsit commentando libros beati Dionysii et in suo Hexaemeron et in expositione libri Posteriorum sint authentica non tamen omnia in schedulis et in abditis scripsit debent authentica reputari' (quoted in A. Pelzer, 'Les versions Latines d'ouvrages de morale/ in Auguste

126 / Neil Lewis Pelzer, Etudes d'histoire litteraire sur la scolastique medievale, ed. A. Pattin and E. van de Vyver (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1964), 170.1 have regularized the orthography in this and other Latin quotations in this paper). 11 See Hunt, The Library of Robert Grosseteste/ in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, ed. Daniel A. Callus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 121-45, at 13°12 In Phys., xxiii. For the Quaestiones in Physicam, see R.P.F. loannis Duns Scoti Doctoris Subtilis Ordinis Minorum, In viii libros Physicorum Aristotelis ^uaestiones, cum annotationes R.P. F. Francisci Pitigiani Arretini, Opera omnia, 2 (Lyon, 1639) ilo-n, 146 (photoreprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olrns Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968). The reference to Bradwardine is found in the following passage (459): 'Octavo, et istam rationemfuit Bragbandam [forfecit Bragbanda ?], quam multi credunt demonstrationem; et capiatur ita, complexum tarn bonum, et tarn perfectum, quo nihil melius et perfectius esse potest: et sit illud complexum A, tune arguitur sic: A potest esse: igitur A est, et per consequens Deus est: quia hoc intelligimus per Deum.' The odd term Bragbandam is apparently a version of Bradwardine's name (as one might have suspected), for we find in Bradwardine's De causa Dei, H. Saville ed. (London: Ex officina Nortoniana apud loannem Billium, 1618; photoreprint Frankfurt a. M.: Minerva, 1964), 2, precisely the argument outlined in the Quaestiones: 'Secundo supponatur ad praesens, quod nullus est processus infinitus in entibus, sed est in quolibet genere unum primum ... Dicatur siquidem causa compendii A aliquid tarn perfectum et bonum, quod nihil perfectius vel melius esse posset. Sumatur quoque possibile ad communem modum loquendi... Possibile igitur est A esse, sen A potest esse, aut posset esse, quis non statim assentiat?... Si autem possibile sit A esse aut si A potest, aut posset esse, A est.' Dales also claims (In Phys., xxiii, n. 70) that the notes are used in an anonymous question on the eternity of the world contained in the MS Assisi, Bibl. Comm.172, written, he suggests, in an Italian hand of the early fourteenth century. But the brief passage in question - 'concedit Lincolniensis quod aliquod infinitum potest esse mains olio infinite, et aliqua infinita plura aliis, sicut in pede quam in linea' (for the full text, see R.C. Dales and O. Argerami, eds., Medieval Latin Texts on the Eternity of the World [Leiden: Brill, 1991], 171) - is not a direct quotation from any of Grosseteste's extant writings, and could easily have been based on Grosseteste's De luce. 13 Rufus writes (E = Erfurt, Quarto 290, fol. 32ra; V = Vat. lat. 4538, fol. 8ova): Item ponamus quod non esse nisi una linea; ipsa est quantitas; ergo mensurabile; ergo potest cognosci. Quomodo igitur habetur cognitio de ea ? Si per partem eius aliquotam, quaeratur quomodo habetur cognitio illius partis. Et oportet ad hoc ut