A subject index that aspires to be as encyclopedic as the mind of its creator

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Lyon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 414 f.17r

Grosseteste's index survives now in a single, incomplete copy, a manuscript kept in the municipal library at Lyon in south-eastern France. A title in red ink announces, 'Here begins the table of Master Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, with the help of Brother Adam Marsh.' Beneath it, a column of glyphs - dots, squiggles, geometric shapes, tiny illustrations, a sun, a flower - snakes downwards and then onwards, in three columns, for another four pages. Each sign is accompanied by a concept: eternity, imagination, truth... These are the topics, or subjects, of Grosseteste's index. Unlike the alphabetically arranged distinctiones of Peter the Chanter, Grosseteste's Tabula is ordered conceptually. The topics, all 440 of them, are grouped into nine top-level categories, broader themes like the mind, created things, the holy scriptures. So, taking Grosseteste's first category, God, as an example, it is broken down into thirty-six topics: that God exists, what God is, the unity of God, the trinity of God, and so on.

The first part of the Tabula then is simply a list of topics and their designated symbols. Essentially, this is a key, a way of remembering what each tiny glyph stands for. The signs are designed to be simple but distinct, a kind of shorthand that Grosseteste can jot in the margins of his books as he reads.

Whenever a particular topic crops up, he can scratch the relevant glyph alongside it for later reference. Sometimes they have a clear relation to the topic - the holy trinity is a triangle; the imagination a flower - but given that the system runs to hundreds of topics, it is inevitable that some will seem arbitrary. S. Harrison Thomson, the first modern scholar to pay real attention to Grosseteste's index, neatly sums up their variety: "All the letters of the Greek and Roman alphabets are used, plus mathematical signs, conjoined conventional signs, modifications of the zodiacal signs, and additional dots, strokes and curves." In Grosseteste's library every book would have been decorated with this pictorial annotation, thousands of glyphs running down the margins like streams of emoticons.

But this is not the index, merely its preamble. After the five-page list of symbols and their meanings, the Tabula returns to where it started, ready to begin in earnest. Now each topic will appear again, in order. This time, however, instead of being merely an item in a list, each topic gives onto a dataset of its own. 

Beneath each topic is a series of references, of locators, first to Bible passages, then to the writings of the Church Fathers, and finally, in a separate column to the right, to pagan or Arabic writers. A headword and a list of locators. Grosseteste's Tabula is more than a book index; it is a books index, a subject index that aspires to be as encyclopedic as the mind of its creator.

Examining the first entry - an deus sit (that God exists) - will offer a sense of how the table works. Naturally enough, the entry begins with the topic and Grosseteste's symbol for it, before moving on to the list of locators. Expanding the abbreviations gives the following (where / indicates liber, i.e. book):

an deus sit ge' I'a•

augustinus contra aduersarios legis et prophetarum• IT•

De trinitate •12 De libero arbitrio I'•I• De uera religione• epistola 38• De ciuitate dei 1-8• 10 1T• gregorius dialogi t:4

*27 Ieronimus 13• damascenus sentenciarum •tIc 3* 41°

anselmus prosologion c 2 3• monologion•

land in the right margin] aritstoteles methaphisice 1:1-20

What this all means is that, should a reader wish to know mote about the proposition that God exists, they might begin by looking at the start of the first chapter of Genesis (i.e., 'ge. 1. 2). Here, of course, they would find In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth',i, reminding them that for anything to be created, a creator has to exist beforehand. The Tabula then directs readers to various works by Augustine - Books 8, 10 and 11 of City of God (De Civitate Dei), for example - or to Gregory's Dialogues, or Jerome, or John of Damascus, or Anselm. And for readers prepared to go off-piste into non-Christian thought, the Tabula suggests the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, where they would find the philosopher discussing the idea of primary causes.

We can test-drive the index today, using it as Grosseteste might have, thanks to the fact that some of the books he owned still survive. Thus, following up one of these references in Grosseteste's own copy of De Civitate Dei, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I can turn to Book 8 and run my finger down the margin until I come across the topic's symbol (some-thing like a snake holding a machine gun, or, at a squint, the letters ST). Augustine, at this point in the text, is arguing that God's existence cannot be thought of in material terms, and that the greatest philosophers have always understood this.