Introduction

Summary

This volume provides the first printed edition of an eighteenth-century study of the life and writings of a renowned thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste (c.1168–1253). The author of the study is the Catholic priest Philip Perry (1720–74), who obtained a doctorate of theology in Paris and served as rector of the English College in Valladolid. The essay can be seen as a contribution to the eighteenth-century English Catholic endeavour to reclaim the pre-Reformation national past, as well as an indication of how Grosseteste's contested reputation reverberated down the centuries.

The author, Fr Philip Perry

Philip Mark Perry was born to an established recusant family at Bilston, Staffordshire. At the age of twenty, having demonstrated academic promise, he was sent to study philosophy at the English College at Douai, an institution which had recently experienced something of a renaissance under the presidency of Robert Witham. During this two-year course Perry continued to show scholarly potential and in 1742 he was selected to attend St Gregory's English College in Paris, there to join an elect group of scholars who were pursuing the rigorous theological course at the Sorbonne. These studies were interrupted by an illness which forced his return to Staffordshire; though he finally obtained his MA in 1748. Three years later he was ordained priest and after continuing his demanding programme of study he gained his doctorate in theology in 1754.

After this date Fr Perry was in England, where for eight years he was chaplain to Rowland Eyre at Hassop Hall, Bakewell, in Derbyshire. It seems that it was during these years that he wrote his Essay on the life and manners of Robert Grossetete. From 1762 he lived at Heythrop Park, Oxfordshire, where he was chaplain to George Talbot, 14th Earl of Shrewsbury. Three years later he was living once more in Staffordshire at Longbirch, with the Vicar Apostolic of the Midlands, the Catholic apologist John Hornyold. Here he accumulated an impressive library, helped in some measure by his friend, the famous hagiographer Alban Butler, who would procure books for him in London. His own inventory of the books in his library tells us that on the open shelves there were 283 works (426 volumes), with a further 92 volumes on Church History in glass cases.