The English churchman and statesman Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253) played an important role in the politics of his time. He was also a major English medieval writer and thinker.

Robert Grosseteste was born at Stradbrooke, Suffolk, of humble parents. Educated at Oxford, where he became magister, or master, in 1199, he then studied at Paris. He was back in England by 1215, where he is believed to have been at the meeting of King John and the barons at Runnymede, where the King accepted the Magna Carta.

Since he was the first English scholar who knew both Greek and Hebrew, Grosseteste soon rose within the Church. In 1224 he was made the first rector of the Franciscans at Oxford, and the next years saw him going through a series of Church positions: archdeacon of Wiltshire, then Northampton and Leicester, prebend of Lincoln, and chancellor of Oxford.

Grosseteste was one of the few...