For this second edition, Sir Richard Southern has revised his much-acclaimed study in the light of recent scholarly research, and added an extensive preliminary chapter on the debate over Robert Grosseteste's career and intellectual growth. He has added c.50 extra pages in which he answers criticisms and adds further material to support his controversial account of Grosseteste's career. He examines particular features of Grosseteste's career in detail, especially his chancellorship of tbe University of Oxford, and provides a fuller account of the tradition of scientific study in England which Grosseteste inherited and transformed.

This is a study of the intellectual development and influence of one of the most independent and vigorous Englishmen of the Middle Ages. As a scientist, theologian and pastoral leader, he was rooted in an English tradition predating the Norman conquest, and he looks forward to such disturbing characters of the later Middle Ages as Piers Plowman and John Wycliffe, though with a wider range of intellectual interests than any of them.