Some Reading Notes from Index, a History of

 

Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln. Lambeth Palace Library link

Today the Church commemorates Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, philosopher and scientist, who died #OnThisDay (Oct 9) in 1253. A pivotal figure in the development of the scientific method, Grosseteste wrote a number of scientific treatises, covering topics such as astronomy, optics, colour, tides, and mathematics in natural science.

As well as science, he also wrote texts on courtly etiquette, theology, and devotional works. This 13th-century manuscript is his Anglo-Norman French allegorical poem 'Château d'amour' (The Castle of Love), where the motif of the medieval castle symbolises the Virgin Mary and her characteristics. The opening page includes an illumination of Grosseteste himself addressing a crowd. His face has been rubbed - though he was never formally canonised, after his death he was revered as a saint across England, and miracles were said to have occurred at his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral.

From Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan.

'Ky bien pense bien poet dire.' A line that practices exactly what it preaches; it is difficult to render it in English without clogging up its rhythm, the succinctness and clarity of the thought it contains. Who thinks well speaks well, perhaps.

From Book of Common Prayer by Thomas Cranmer (1549)

Blessed Lord, which hast caused al holy Scriptures to bee written for our learnyng; graunte us that we maye in such wise heare them, read, marke, learne, and inwardly digeste them. 

Later chapters deal with the ironic index, made to mock the original. For example...

Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Henry Morley (London: Cassell and Co., 1886), pp. iv–v.

(gloss from another website: Henry Mackenzie’s 1771 novel The Man of Feeling – as Thomas Dixon wrote in September last year, while in the eighteenth century Robert Burns could describe it ‘as a book I prize next to the Bible’, by the Victorian period it was being published with an ‘index of weeping’, mocking its tear-sodden narrative.)