Coming to a bookshop or library near you in four weeks time…this is the first volume in a projected series to encompass all of Grosseteste’s scientific treatises. That on colour is short, intense and, as with Grosseteste’s other treatises on natural science, extremely beautiful in its precision and structure. The volume is a genuinely inter-disciplinary project, involving six primary authors: Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Giles Gasper, Mike Huxtable, Tom McLeish, Cecilia Panti and Hannah Smithson. The book presents a new, authoritative critical edition, an English translation, commentary on the historical and contextual circumstances of the subject – key terms, sources, dating -, and commentary from a scientific perspective – how do the interpretative tools of modern colour vision sharpen an investigation of this much earlier text. Appendices on the versions of the text in a 13th century compendium of scientific knowledge, the De propreitatibus rerum of Bartolomaeus Anglicus, and in a Middle English by John Trevisa, are also included.
The process of writing together was immensely rewarding: the lively and constant debate on the translation of terms, the realisation of the mathematical concision of the treatise and the a growing sense of the significance of the subject and the treatises’s place within Grosseteste’s oeuvre were amongst the many high-points.
This page is devoted to all things connected to the treatise on colour: viva, de colore!