Robert Grosseteste: Founder of the tradition of scientific thought

Robert Grosseteste (1175 – 1253) was an outstanding figure in thirteenth-century intellectual life. He developed an original cosmological theory, the so-called metaphysics of light, based on light as the common form of all bodies and elaborated a scientific method.

Some scholars consider the work of Robert Grosseteste to mark the beginnings of modern experimental science. His thought is representative of the conflicting currents in the intellectual climate of Europe in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

On the one hand, his commitment to acquiring, understanding and making accessible to his Latin contemporaries the texts and ideas of newly discovered Arabic and Greek intellectual tradition places him in the vanguard of a sweeping movement transforming European thought during his lifetime.

Robert Grosseteste was a man of unusually wide-ranging interests. His scientific writings – on astronomy and its practical application of the calculation of the ecclesiastical calendar, meteorology, comets, the tides, the understanding of natural laws in term of geometry and lights and optics – were mostly composed before 1235.

Grosseteste’s short works in optics, particularly his De lineis-De natura locorum and De iride, assign great importance to mathematical in scientific explanations of the physical world.
Robert Grosseteste: Founder of the tradition of scientific thought