Robert Grosseteste c. 1175 – 1253

Robert Grosseteste was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian, and bishop of Lincoln. He served as the first chancellor of the University of Oxford and as the leading translator into Latin of the Greek philosophical and patristic heritage of his time. His treatises On Light and the Hexaemeron developed a metaphysics of light in which the spread of luminous form is the principle of all bodily existence, anticipating both medieval optics and themes of modern natural philosophy. As bishop, he was a fearless reformer who refused royal and papal demands he considered unjust.

Robert Grosseteste was born around 1175 in Suffolk, in a family of obscure but free origin. He was educated probably at Lincoln and Hereford, served in the household of the bishop of Hereford, and from around 1214 lectured in the schools of Oxford. From 1229 to 1235 he was first reader to the new Franciscan house of studies in Oxford, and from 1235 until his death he was bishop of Lincoln, the largest English diocese.

His writings include philosophical and scientific treatises (On Light, On the Heat of the Sun, On Lines, Angles and Figures, On Color, On the Tides), the long Hexaemeron, commentaries on the Posterior Analytics and the Physics of Aristotle, the first complete Latin translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, translations of the writings attributed to Pseudo-Dionysius and of John of Damascus, and a vast body of scholastic disputed questions and pastoral writings as bishop. He patronized the young Roger Bacon.

Grosseteste's metaphysics of light, in which the divine creative act unfolds the cosmos through the propagation of self-multiplying light, gave the Latin West an ambitious mathematical natural philosophy with strong Augustinian and Neoplatonic resonances. As bishop he fought for the rights of his diocese against royal and papal encroachments, and as scholar he laid the groundwork for the Oxford tradition of mathematical natural science. He died at Buckden in October 1253.