Robert Grosseteste belonged to a generation of Anglo-Normans who benefited greatly from the enlightened high-school education of twelfth-century England. Coming from a family of serfs, he rose through the ranks to become magister scholarum (master of the scholars) at Oxford; lector to the Franciscans; one of the first chancellors of Oxford University in the thirteenth century; and finally, in his late sixties, bishop of Lincoln, head of one of the most important ecclesiastical centers in medieval England. He seems to have been born around 1160. He is recorded as a member of the household of Bishop William de Vere at Hereford in 1190. He was commended for his legal and medical knowledge, and sometime after the death of de Vere in 1198 he began teaching at Oxford. During the suspension of the clerks from 1209 to 1214, when the university ceased to exist on account of a murder case, Grosseteste went to Paris...