Table Of ContentRobert Grosseteste and the 13th-Century Diocese of Lincoln
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Later Medieval Europe
Managing Editor
Douglas Biggs (University of Nebraska—Kearney)
Editors
Sara M. Butler (The Ohio State University)
Kelly DeVries (Loyola University Maryland)
William Chester Jordan (Princeton University)
Cynthia J. Neville (Dalhousie University)
Kathryn L. Reyerson (University of Minnesota)
volume 19
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lme
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Robert Grosseteste and the
13th-Century Diocese of Lincoln
An English Bishop’s Pastoral Vision
By
Philippa M. Hoskin
leiden | boston
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Cover illustration: Taylor MS. 1; Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 The Background to Reform 21
2 Grosseteste’s Theory of Pastoral Care 47
3 The Principal Shepherds of the Sheep: Grosseteste’s Administration
within the Diocese 79
4 Friars and Visitation: Grosseteste’s Interventions in the Diocese 101
5 A Royal Priesthood: Grosseteste’s Parish Priests 128
6 Illuminating the Darkness: Grosseteste’s Panoptic Vision of the
Diocese 153
7 Grosseteste’s Pastoral Afterlife 180
Conclusion 213
Bibliography 223
Index 252
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Acknowledgments
This book began with conversations with scholars across the UK and North
America. Amongst individuals, Dr Nicholas Bennett shared his expertise on
thirteenth-century Lincoln with me and suggested that Grosseteste’s adminis-
trative records deserved a closer examination. Conversations with academics
connected to the British Academy’s English Episcopal Acta series, particular-
ly David d’Avray, Julia Barrow, Martin Brett, Nicholas Karn and David Smith
were invaluable and other colleagues, including Donald Logan, Ian Forrest,
John Arnold, Jamie Wood and Michael Burger discussed different aspects of
European pastoral care and episcopal administration.
I am also grateful to audiences who listened to and commented on papers
that became part of, or partly influenced, this book. Attendees at the Thirteenth
Century England conference and across several years of papers at the Interna-
tional Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, made valuable comments. The
Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham invited me to speak
to their Medieval Minds series and the research network Episcopus asked me
to be part of a session at the International Medieval Congress, University of
Michigan, Kalamazoo. Academics with expertise in theology and philosophy
answered my questions as much as I answered theirs at ‘Robert Grosseteste
and the pursuit of Religious and Scientific learning’ The Third International
Robert Grosseteste Conference.
I also want to thank the editors and board of Brill’s Late Medieval Europe
series for their helpful comments on the text and Marcella Mulder and Elisa
Perotti for all their help in guiding this book.
Finally, as ever, I am more grateful than I can say to Sara for all her love and
support. She has always been prepared to discuss the medieval Church and to
provide valuable insights from her own knowledge of the English Church in
later centuries. This book is for her.
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Introduction
Master Robert Grosseteste, even long before his rise to the episcopate,
shone forth in the eminence of his merits and his learning and was
adorned with excellence. After he was raised by God to the highest dig-
nity of episcopal office, he did not cease to demonstrate the fervent zeal
which he had for the cure of souls in the effective execution of his episco-
pal office, so setting himself up as a wall for the house of the Lord.1 In his
pastoral care for all the needy, and particularly in defence of ecclesiasti-
cal liberties, he proved publically, in the strenuous execution of his office,
that he should be described as a good pastor.2
In 1288, Oliver Sutton, bishop of Lincoln 1280–1299, wrote to the pope, urging
him to consider an inquiry to establish grounds for the canonisation of Robert
Grosseteste. In the years after his death, many testified to his enthusiasm for
pastoral care: that is to the extent of his oversight of the spiritual life of the
men and women over whom the Church had given him jurisdiction, and his
duty to guide them to heaven.3 Other letters in the same dossier – from the
dean and chapter of Lincoln, from the local abbey of Bardney and from the
then bishop of Worcester, Godfrey Giffard – also spoke of Grosseteste’s zeal in
his care for the men and women of his diocese and their souls. His immediate
posthumous reputation was, then, that of a good pastoral bishop in the pat-
tern laid down by the great Church council of 1215, now known as the Fourth
Lateran Council.
Robert Grosseteste was not, however, a bishop focused solely upon the prac-
tical work involved in ensuring the salvation of his flock. He was also a man
1 “Murum pro domo Israel”. See Ezekiel 13: 5 ‘You have not gone up into the breaches, or built
up a wall for the house of Israel, that it might stand in battle in the day of the Lord’. This
also appears in Grosseteste’s statement delivered before the Council of Lyon in 1245, see The
Letters of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, ed. F.A.C. Mantello and J. Goering (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2010), no. 127, p. 422 (Roberti Grosseteste Episcopi quondam Lin-
colniensis Epistolae, ed. H.R. Luard (Rolls Series, 1861), 417) addressed to the dean and chapter:
‘the bishop is a wall set up between the souls, collectively and singularly entrusted to him,
and the attacking enemy’ which he goes on to describe as vices and demons.
2 This quotation is from Lincoln Cathedral, Dj/20/2a, mem. 1; for detailed (though not per-
fect) calendars of these letters see R.E.G. Cole, ‘Proceedings relative to the canonization of
Robert Grosseteste bishop of Lincoln’, Associated Architectural Societies’ Reports and Papers
33 (1915), 1–28.
3 Lincoln Cathedral, Dj/20/2a, mems 1, 2; see again Cole, ‘Proceedings relative to the Canoniza-
tion of Robert Grosseteste bishop of Lincoln’, 1–28.
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2 Introduction
of learning, a scholar who participated in the intellectual concerns of the aca-
demic elite of his day. The surviving material written by him, or issued in his
name, which dealt with pastoral care includes scholarly and practical works
for the guidance of the clergy and the laity, as well as sermons addressed both
to lay and clerical audiences. He left a collection of notes from his lectures
and sermons, compiled by Grosseteste himself, now known as his Dicta; his
letter collection, also possibly compiled by the bishop; his Tabula, a collec-
tion of references from biblical and patristic works, arranged thematically;
and the rolls created by his central administration during his episcopate.4 The
records and writings of his contemporaries also bear witness to his pastoral
intentions. These middle years of the century, when Grosseteste was bishop of
Lincoln, were a period in which the influence of the movement for interna-
tional Church reform, renewed and redirected through the Fourth Lateran
Council of 1215, should have been at work in English dioceses, encouraging
a concentration upon the pastoral care and salvation of the individual. Gros-
seteste’s academic and practical work provides an opportunity to see this in
practice in one English diocese.
Grosseteste himself – his science, his philosophy, and his theology – has
been the focus of much academic work5 and his pastoral handbooks and
guidance are well known. There has been, however, no full, detailed examina-
tion of his pastoral theory and practice; the cause to which he claimed to be
dedicated. Leonard Boyle’s seminal article about Grosseteste’s pastoral care,
published in 1976, built upon a shorter, earlier piece by James H. Srawley in
1955, which was included in the essays published to celebrate the seven hun-
dredth anniversary of Grosseteste’s consecration as bishop.6 However, these
4 For recent editions of the letters, Tabula and rolls see The Letters of Robert Grosseteste
( Epistolae Grosseteste); Philipp W. Rosemann, ‘Roberti Grosseteste Tabula’, in Opera Roberti
Grosseteste Lincolniensis Volumen Primum (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis
130, 1995), 235–320; Robert Grosseteste as Bishop of Lincoln: The Episcopal Rolls, 1235–1253, ed.
Philippa M. Hoskin (Woodbridge: Lincoln Record Society Kathleen Major Series 1, 2015). The
Dicta have not yet received a modern edition.
5 Many of these volumes will be referred to in this book: amongst the most central are James
McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) and R.W.
Southern, Robert Grosseteste: the Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (2nd ed.,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). On Grosseteste’s theology see Southern, ibid., and James
Ginther, Master of the Sacred Page: a study of the theology of Robert Grosseteste ca. 1229/30–1235
(Aldershot: Routledge, 2004). On Grosseteste’s science a good introduction is still A.C.
Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1956) though see too later in the introduction for a reassessment of Crombie’s view of
Grosseteste’s experimental science. For reassessment of particular sources see too the work
of the Ordered Universe Project, Durham University (http:/ordered-universe.com).
6 Leonard E. Boyle, ‘Robert Grosseteste and the Pastoral Care’, in Medieval and Renaissance
Studies: proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies summer
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