Robert Grosseteste

Robert Grosseteste lived circa 1168-70 to 8 or 9 October 1253 and, also known as Robert Greathead or Robert of Lincoln, was an English statesman, scholastic philosopher, theologian, scientist and Bishop of Lincoln, born of humble parents in Suffolk according to the early fourteenth century chronicler Nicholas Trivet. Upon his death he was revered as a saint in England, though attempts to procure formal canonisation failed; the historian A.C. Crombie called him the real founder of the tradition of scientific thought in medieval Oxford, and in some ways of the modern English intellectual tradition. As a theologian, however, he contributed to increasing hostility toward Jews and Judaism, spreading through his translation of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs the accusation that Jews had purposefully suppressed prophetic knowledge of the coming of Christ.