ABSTRACT
For the last half-century, students of the life and works of Robert Grosseteste have employed the descriptor ‘scholar and bishop’ as a means of summarising this English thinker’s long and remarkable life.1 It has also guided modern readers through the large corpus of writings that Grosseteste penned. Grosseteste was a scholar of the natural world, who wrote treatises on cosmology, meteorology, and optics – to name but three major fields of his research.2 He was also a philosophical scholar who committed to vellum his reflections on Aristotelian logic, mathematical theory, metaphysics and philosophical psychology.3 His accomplishments as bishop were equally significant. He was a principal protagonist in reinvigorating episcopal visitations, much to the chagrin of his detractors.4 Above all, he is best known for his promotion of the pastoral care. He protected the cure of souls by ensuring that all pastoral appointments in his diocese strictly fulfilled canonical requirements. As his letter collection reveals, he never shifted his position in response to a candidate’s patron, be he a fellow bishop, noble or even the king.5 He also did all that he could to improve the context of church ministry, which included the publication of an influential set of diocesan statutes that implemented the ministerial programmes of the Fourth Lateran Council.6 In the last years of his episcopacy, he took his campaign for a more rigorous programme of pastoral care to the papal court, where he produced a memoranda designed to inform Innocent IV of the problems threatening pastoral ministry in the English church.7
