Philip Perry's Essay on the Life and Manners of the Venerable Robert Grosseteste presents us not only with a high standard of biographical scholarship but also a fine example of English eighteenth-century polemical writing. Grosseteste was a formidable thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln who, because of his insistence upon the primacy of Scripture and his apparent wrangling with the papacy, had long been claimed as a type of proto-Protestant in the...