Robert Grosseteste, Translator of Dionysius

AbstractThis survey of the work of Robert Grosseteste as translator of Dionysius demonstrates that he was capable of improving on both the readings and the renderings of his predecessors in Latin. At the same time, this thirteenth-century philosopher, scholar, and Bishop of Lincoln shares with Sarracenus and Aquinas a belief that the summit of perfection for souls is the intellectual or speculative contemplation of God, and therefore adapts his renderings to this theory, in contrast to Thomas Gallus, for whom love supersedes reason in the last stages of the ascent to the ineffable. Grosseteste is notable also for the fact that, after learning Greek in his later years, he produced his own translations into Latin of the works of Dionysius.