Master of the Sacred Page: A Study of the Theology of Robert Grosseteste, ca. 1229/30–1235. By James R. Ginther. Pp. xvi + 232. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. isbn 0 7546 1649 5. £50

Abstract

This is an important book, complementing and bringing up to date R. W. Southern's definitive intellectual biography of Grosseteste (1992) in the light of the additional knowledge of the Grosseteste corpus made possible through James Ginther's own pioneering work on the texts in connection with the ‘Electronic Grosseteste Project’. It also makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the theology course at Oxford in its early stages. It never loses sight of the context in which Grosseteste was lecturing, disputing, and preaching on the themes which are discussed. The first section explores the instruments available to a prospective academic theologian when Grosseteste served his period of Regency in theology, about 1230–5. Peter Lombard's Sentences had not yet fully established themselves as the basic textbook of the systematic theology course and it was historically too soon for him to think of writing a summa. Grosseteste's writings reflect the resulting lack of system, but they also suggest that he felt it. He made some experimental ventures into tabulation and indexing and referencing, in which his arrangement of themes foreshadows that of future summa literature. The extremely important point is made that the development of a systematic approach, which relies on rational argument, was not in itself a departure from the twelfth-century tradition that theology is the study of Scripture. The two methods are complementary, as Grosseteste's commentary on the Hexaemeron makes plain.