Higher Education Postcard: Bishop Grosseteste University

Greetings from Lincoln!

If you walk from Lincoln, up the aptly named Steep Hill, past the Castle and Cathedral, under the Roman arch and along Ermine Street, the old Roman road, you come to Bishop Grosseteste University, depicted in today’s postcard.

You can see the cathedral in the background, to the left.

The card was sent from Lincoln in 1905 to Miss Wooldridge in Sawston, Cambridgeshire. “Thanks for post cards. They are very good. GRB”

Established in 1862 as the Lincoln Diocesan Training School for Mistresses, the university occupies buildings originally used for an earlier, unsuccessful, training college for male teachers. It is positioned atop the only hill for miles around and has the most magnificent light – if only there were an art school here!

The College was named for Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1962, to mark its centenary. It was granted University status in 2012 as Bishop Grosseteste University. Marvellously, for those of us old enough to remember the Magic Roundabout, its centenary history was written by D H J Zebedee.

Robert Grosseteste lived from 1168 to 1253 and was a churchman and a scholar, perhaps studying at Paris and Oxford (student records were not what they now are) and teaching at Oxford too. As well as theology, he wrote on scientific topics, and the use of mathematics in science, and taught Roger Bacon. He was one of the people, therefore, who helped to develop scientific thought in medieval Europe. (Importantly, other cultures at other times had also developed scientific approaches to understanding nature.)