Jurisdictional Formalism
This chapter explores post-Lateran IV ecclesiastical reformism, focusing on the ecclesiology and pastoral theology of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln. Grosseteste understood pastoral care not only as the clergy’s most vital responsibility to the laity but also as a form of participation in the divinely ordered natural universe. His pastoral and estate management writings to women accordingly reveal the degree to which this ecclesiology finds inspiration in the ideal of the justly governed estate. This chapter reads Grosseteste’s Anglo-French soteriological allegory, the Château d’Amour, alongside his writings to and for women, showing how the logic of secular property law becomes a means of narrating Christian time from the Creation through the Redemption to the Final Judgment. Grosseteste’s larger corpus, however, also reveals the extent to which his vision of Christian history is premised on Jewish exclusion, not only in theological but legal and practical terms.