The Ordered Universe team are throwing themselves into 2018 with another symposium that will focus on preparing our collaborative editions and translations of the shorter scientific works of Robert Grosseteste.
The symposium will be held Jan 7th–10th 2018 at Pembroke College, Oxford, and this time around the team will be reading Robert Grosseteste’s De cometis, De sex differentiis and De impressionibus elementorum.
All three treatises have formed part of Ordered Universe collaborative reading before and their texts are now ready for a final polish and new discussion of Grosseteste’s ideas in light of the developments in our understanding of those ideas and the sources to which Grosseteste may (or may not) have had access. None of the treatises are easy to date, but probably date to the 1210s and the early 1220s, with the first hints of the crucial doctrines and methodologies for the middle and later works. The sublimation of matter raised in the De cometis and the construction of the De impressionibus around the resolutio and composito, point towards works like the De luce, De colore and De iride, and the Commentary on Posterior Analytics of the mid and later 1220s.
We will post a report on the symposium in the days following our discussion, but for now, on the same sphere, under the same sky, but in different places, twenty Grosseteste scholars are packing their suitcases and getting ready for an interdisciplinary treat.