Grosseteste

Duncan locates the origins of the index in the 13th century, when the English polymath Robert Grosseteste — poet, lecturer, preacher, statesman — created his “Tabula,” so that he could efficiently access the many sources for his vast store of knowledge.

In 1953 Alistair Crombie published a book entitled Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science.

Grosseteste’s own practice demonstrates a remarkable indifference to experimental procedure; thus he formulated a general principle of refraction, but he simply assumed that it must, like the law of reflection, involve equal angles, and never conducted the elementary tests which would have shown that this assumption was misplaced.

He produced a new theory of the rainbow which emphasized the role of refraction, where Aristotle had only mentioned reflection; but there is no evidence that Grosseteste ever conducted experiments to test his theory.

In the Middle Ages, for example, Grosseteste adopted a neo-Platonist view that true knowledge was based on illumination, and the perfect form of knowledge was that of the angels, who needed no sensory experience of reality to know the divine mind and the universe through it.