ABSTRACT
Robert Grosseteste boldly claims that learning grounded in the right kind of education – one based in the seven liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric followed by music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy – can correct human actions, and eventually lead to a state of holiness. This chapter aims to reconcile Grosseteste’s decision to teach in French verse with his more formal statements and practice on education and its capacity to sanctify. It explores the ways in which poetry conflicts with the sanctifying potential Grosseteste sees in the liberal arts curriculum, and how the pressure of this position allows him to compose the Chasteu as a pedagogical act attuned to very particular aims and circumstances. The idea that particulars and ornamented language might be redeemed by their instrumental use as a kind of rhetoric finds a strong correlative in Gratian’s Decretals, a body of canon law with which Grosseteste is bound to have been familiar.
