THE DIFFINICIO EUCARISTIE FORMERLY ATTRIBUTED TO ROBERT GROSSETESTE

Abstract

Among the theological writings attributed to Robert Grosseteste, the famous scholar and Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to 1253, is a brief work ascribed in the unique manuscript copy Diffinicio EucaristieEucaristie secundum sanctum Robertum Episcopum Lincolniensem. In his extensive survey of the manuscripts containing Grosseteste's writings, S. Harrison Thomson found only the one copy, in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B. 15.20 (356), a fifteenth-century codex. He comments that the lack of early copies and the 'patently fragmentary nature' of the text suggest that it has been extracted from a larger work such as Grosseteste's Dicta} Kevin W. Purday published an edition of the text from this manuscript in 1976, and argued from it that Grosseteste's teaching on transubstantiation differed from that current on the Continent and given official currency by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.2 Leonard E. Boyle subsequently took issue with this conclusion.3 After correcting several errors in Purday's transcription of the manuscript, Boyle argued persuasively that the doctrine of the treatise (which he inclined not to ascribe to Grosseteste) was in fact faithful to the general consensus concerning transubstantiation. Both Purday and Boyle commented on the faulty nature of this manuscript copy of the text, and like Thomson, hoped that further manuscript discoveries might clarify both the content and the context of this work.