ESSAY ON THE LIFE AND MANNERS OF ROBERT

Philip 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 The manuscript remained unpublished for fear of causing scandal, and now sees its first printed edition.

Philip Perry was an English Roman Catholic priest and a prolific scholar, born to an old Staffordshire recusant family in 1720. After studies at Douai and in Paris, he was in 1767 appointed rector of the English College, Valladolid. He died in Madrid during a heatwave in 1774.

Jack P. Cunningham is Reader in Ecclesiastical History at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK, with a special interest in philosophy and theology in the high Middle Ages. He is director of the International Robert Grosseteste Study Centre at BGU and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Previous publications he has edited include Robert Grosseteste: His Thought and Its Impact; Robert Grosseteste and the Pursuit of Religious and Scientific Learning in the Middle Ages (with M. Hocknull); and Robert Grosseteste and Theories of Education (with Steven Puttick).