SOURCE: Southern, Richard William. “The Grosseteste Problem.” In Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, pp. 3-25. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Southern examines contrasting interpretations of Grosseteste's ideas, demonstrating how commentators perceive Grosseteste as both a moderate figure representative of papal reform and an eccentric extremist.

I. Divergent Views

The thoughts and actions of all notable historical characters offer grounds for wide differences of interpretation. But Robert Grosseteste offers more grounds, and has been the subject of more widely contrasting interpretations, than most. Observers in his own day, and interpreters ever since, have tended to portray him either as an extremist, in varying ways original, eccentric, discordant; or as an essentially moderate and representative figure in the central stream of European scholastic and scientific thought, and of papally directed ecclesiastical reform and pastoral care. The second of these views has won...