Philip Perry, Essay on the Life and Manners of Robert Grosseteste, edited by Jack P. Cunningham, Woodbridge: Catholic Record Society: Record Series Volume 89, The Boydell Press, 2022, pp. l + 247, £50.00/$75.00, ISBN: 978-0-902832-34-3

Abstract

Philip Perry (1720-74) was a Catholic priest and scholar. From a Staffordshire Catholic family, he was educated at the English College at Douai and St Gregory’s English College in Paris. He was ordained priest in 1751 and obtained his doctorate in theology in 1754. In 1767, Perry was appointed rector of the English College of St Alban, Valladolid, Spain, and although his duties there proved time-consuming, he none the less undertook historical research on a range of subjects. Inter alia, he prepared a life of Robert Grosseteste, the thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln. After Perry’s death, this and other manuscripts were returned to Britain. This volume, edited by Jack P. Cunningham, is the first publication of the ‘Essay’ on Grosseteste. Grosseteste (c.1170-1253) was, of course, a quite remarkable man. One towering modern interpreter, Sir Richard Southern, summarized his career enthusiastically: ‘scientist, theologian, and bishop of Lincoln, [he] combined a very humble origin with torrential energy, great ability, and a rarely paralleled breadth of intellectual interests’.1 Given such distinction, that Grosseteste fascinated Perry is unsurprising. But, in the two centuries following the Reformation, Grosseteste’s life excited some religious controversy. The reason for this is indicated by the Victorian stained-glass window in Lincoln Cathedral reproduced on the volume’s cover: it shows Grosseteste remonstrating with the Pope about abuses in the curia. That clash, and other ‘evidence’, allowed Protestants to claim the Bishop as a proto-Protestant; and Perry endeavoured to refute the identification. Perry entitled his study an ‘Essay on the life and manners of the venerable Robert Grossetete [sic], Bishop of Lincoln, from his own works and from contemporary Writers’. In preparation, he had read widely and painstakingly; the works cited by him are listed on pp. 231-4 of this edition. Perry organized the material into four books, each containing short chapters. He had no doubt as to Grosseteste’s greatness: the Bishop was variously ‘our heroe’, ‘[o]ur most meek Prelate’, ‘our judicious Prelate’, ‘our active Prelate’, ‘our penetrating Prelate’, ‘our generous Prelate’, ‘[o]ur intrepid Prelate’, and ‘our strenuous and patriot Prelate’. Therefore one object of the ‘Essay’, Perry stated in his Preface,