rhetorical antitheses set up by early Christian apologists. Recurrence theories are certainly a feature of Greek thinking about the past, but were far from being universally accepted or implied; and it is equally significant that the view taken by pagan historians from Herodotus to Ammianus Marcellinus that the course ofhuman history reveals divine chastisement of human excess finds an obvious counterpart in the demonstration by such Christian historians as Eusebius and Lactantius of Gods overthrow of the unrighteous. But for all the reasonableness of his conclusion, Presss argu- ment is fatally flawed by the nature ofhis procedures. His central chapters, with their lengthy discussion of the uses of the term historia and its cognates, do not, and cannot, amount to a discussion of the idea of history, and to suppose that it is possible, as Press claims (p. 19), to determine, through the study ofthe term [my italics], the content and develop- ment of the idea of history in antiquity is to suppose a very implausible correspondence between terms and ideas. Whatever changes the uses of these terms may or may not have undergone, there is a body of practice - which could loosely be called thinking about and trying to explain the human past - which was carried on with varying degrees of success at various times throughout antiquity, sometimes - as in the cases of Thucydides and Polybius - with some reflexion on its nature. No account of the development ofthe idea ofhistory in antiquity can afford to ignore these attempts and the views which they expressed or implied; and if i t should be objected that this is to prejudge the meaning of history, it has to be said that some such prejudgment is already implicit in Presss denial of the conflict between the two traditions. The artificiality of his procedure is illustrated by his translation (p. 30) of historian peri phuse5s (Plato, Phaedo 96a) as history of nature, and by his reference (p. 20) to Thucydides and Livy as historians in inverted commas.

Presss examination of the terminology could have been made much tauter, and suffers from a failure to distinguish between absolute uses of historia and uses with an object specified; but there is much of value and much that is acute in his careful distinctions. Combined with an equally thorough survey of a wider range of terms, and of the practice of ancient historians and oftheir view ofwhat they were doing, it would form the basis for a satisfactory account of the development of the idea of history in antiquity. UN I V E R S l T Y OF L.\NC:ASIER JOHN CREED

The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste By JAMES M ~ E V O Y Clarendon Press, 1982. xvii + 560 pp. E35.00 For a medieval philosopher to be frequently cited by later medieval writers and thus become an auctor was a great honour, normally reserved to those of classical or patristic remoteness. But Lincolniensis - the name derives from Grossetestes diocese - achieved it. Subsequent historiography has also looked kindly on him, and in this century he has even been hailed as a

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founder of modern science - a case most forcibly put in A. C. Crombies Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (Oxford, 1953), although somewhat retracted in the books second impression (1962). McEvoy gives some attention to this side of Grosseteste, and emphasises the significance of his giving a mathematical structure to physical reality (via his metaphysics of light) as more important than his methodological discussions. But McEvoys main concern is elsewhere, as is evidenced by the relative space accorded to the three sections of the book bearing directly on Grossetestes philosophy: The Light of Nature (his physical thought) has 74 pages, as compared to 96 for The Angelic Light (angelology and pseudo-Dionysian translations and commentaries) and 2 17 for The Light of Intelligence (psychology and anthropology). At the beginning of the angelological section we are warned that the student of medieval literature and ideas must submit to the vast readjustment in seeing man, not as the creature standing at the top ofthe evolutionary stair the foot ofwhich is lost in a biological underworld, but as the figure visible at the bottom ofJacobs ladder, the summit of which is invisible with light, the traffic of which intense (p. 51).

McEvoy is thus insistent on emphasising the foreignness of medieval thought, a policy with which I have in principle much sympathy, and have publicly commended elsewhere. But an inescapable flagging attention at many points in reading this book made me ponder the dangers of extreme anti-anachronism. Partly it is a question ofselection: why should I be more interested in Grossetestes angelology or indeed in Grosseteste himself than in countless other facets of past thought that several lifetimes would be insufficient to cover? Partly also of contextualisation: the twentieth-century reader needs more help in recognising the layout and significance of the already existing landforms and artefacts in Grossetestes strange country in order to appreciate better the excitement of his own constructions. For in many ways McEvoy has gone native, and no longer clearly recognises what especially demands explanation in his letters home.

But going native, and even falling in love with ones chosen subject (cf. p. vii), does not necessarily mean that one will be fully accepted by ones adopted society as one of themselves. And there are times when McEvoy seems to me to be speaking a subtly different language from Grosseteste himself. As an example let me give first my own translation from Grosse- testes Latin, and then follow that with McEvoys paraphrase of the same passage.

Nor let the fact that Aristotle and other philosophers prove God to be unchangeable and non-temporal and suchlike influence anyone into thinking that he or the other philosophers clearly understood the simp- licity of eternity, because we must know that by the discourse of reason we prove many things to be true whose essence we do not understand, just as many men know how to show by firm reasoning that intelligences exist and that God exists, but do not understand the divine essence or the incorporeality of intelligences, but see them behind corporeal phantasms, like the sun behind a cloud, and, if they follow the phantasms, they falsely

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assert many corporeal properties of non-corporeals and say and judge the contraries of what elsewhere they have discovered by the discourse of their reason.

McEvoy renders this as follows (p. 356). I italicise those parts where he seems to show deviation from Grosseteste.

Aristotle and other philosophers prove Gods zmmortality and intem- porality; but no one should be deceived by his conclusion, for the dis- course of reason can convince us of the truth of many things, without always being able to give us an understanding of their essence. There haue been men who have demonstrated the spirituality of the intelligences and the reality of God, without understanding the content of either notion. They see realzty under the influence of corporeal phantasms -as it were, the sun through a cloud - and continue to speak and think the very opposite of what the discourse of reason has revealed to them.

Small points perhaps, but I suspect tendentiousness, although I am not able precisely to characterise the tendency: probably it has something to do with a particular form of theological education. But doubtless McEvoy would accept a judgment of this kind, for in discussing Crombies thesis he stresses that there can be no history-writing without presuppositions (p. 206), although he does not attempt to spell out his own.

The above criticisms are directed more against a genre than against a book, and indeed a genre in which very much ofthe best work on medieval philosophy has been done. I t remains to emphasise the wealth of fine erudition that has gone into this book: it will be the constant companion of the Grosseteste student. Among its many other virtues it includes an up-dating of S. H. Thomsons Grosseteste bibliography of 1940. U N I V E RS I T Y 0 F ~\ B ERD E EN ,\ C;E.ORCiI.: MOI,L.\hU

Reformed Thought and Scholasticism

E. J . Brill, 1982. viii + 249 pp. Dfl. 38 By J O H N P1,AII

Subtitled The Arguments for the Existence of God in Dutch Theology 1575-1650, this study is concerned with tracing the extent to which John Calvins views on the natural knowledge ofGod came to be developed into a full-orbed natural theology by the second generation of Reformed theo- logians in Holland. Calvin held that all men have an innate awareness of God, and, in addition, that something in Gods existence and character is to be seen i n nature. But according to Calvin this existence, without super- natural revelation and regenerating grace, does not lead men to a full knowledge of God, but only renders them inexcusable.

Dr Platt follows up several difrerent lines of enquiry. He argues that the various published abridgements of Calvins Znrtitutes, Dutch writings on the Heidelberg Catechism (the standard Reformed Catechism on the Conti- nent) and on the Belgic Confession, together show a change in theological

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