Essay on the Life and Manners of Robert Grosseteste (Catholic Record Society: Records Series, 89)

This eighteenth-century study of the life and writings of the medieval English bishop Robert Grosseteste was too scandalous to be published in its author's lifetime. It is now available in print for the first time, showing how Grosseteste's reputation continued to be contested five centuries after his death.\nPhilip Perry's Essay on the Life and Manners of the Venerable Robert Grosseteste presents us not only with a high standard of biographical scholarship but also a fine example of English eighteenth-century polemical writing. Grosseteste was a formidable thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln who, because of his insistence upon the primacy of Scripture and his apparent wrangling with the papacy, had long been claimed as a type of proto-Protestant in the English post-Reformation historical tradition. Perry sets out in his Essay a vivid account of Grosseteste's life and achievements to advance his cause as a worthy saint and to recover his reputation as a loyal son of the Roman Church. His frank discussion of the abuses that Grosseteste opposed and the controversies in which he engaged put his text beyond the limits of what a Catholic priest could advisably print in eighteenth-century England. The manuscript remained unpublished for fear of causing scandal, and now sees its first printed edition