author
Robert Steele
1860–1944
Known for bringing long-hidden medieval texts into print, this British scholar devoted decades to the works of Roger Bacon. His interests ranged from old manuscripts to social ideas, giving his writing and editing work an unusually wide reach.
1 Audiobook
The Story of Alexander
by Robert Steele
About the author
A British scholar and editor, Robert Steele is best remembered for his long effort to publish previously unedited writings by the medieval thinker Roger Bacon. Between the early 1900s and 1941, he worked on the 16-volume Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Bacon, a major scholarly project that helped make Bacon's work more accessible to later readers.
Sources on his life also describe him as a disciple of William Morris in his younger years, with Morris influencing both his interest in medieval literature and his sympathy for socialism. Steele studied at Cambridge and became known as a medievalist, philologist, and librarian as well as an editor.
His surviving papers show that his interests were not limited to Bacon alone: they include research on figures such as John Dee and other manuscript-based work. Altogether, he stands out as one of those patient scholars whose careful editorial labor quietly shaped how later generations read the medieval past.