Letters of Peter Abelard, Beyond the Personal

General Introduction: Life and Works

general introduction. Life and Works Life The twelfth century has benefited from a disproportionate share of the curiosity, romantic attraction, and even daydreams and fantasies that have been elicited by the extraordinarily vibrant and variegated millennium to which the label the “Middle Ages” has been affixed. Attempts have been made to validate earlier spans of time within this thousand years as having undergone equivalently consequential and productive renewals, so that the terms “Carolingian Renaissance” and “Ottonian Renaissance” have sometimes been bandied about, but the first such formulation, and the most abiding one, remains the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance.” This period, often tacitly protracted to a hundred fifty years by appending at either end an additional quarter century (1075– 1225), has been and continues to be scrutinized for such disparate phenomena as the creation of new religious institutions; the rise of universities; the salience of love (or at least of talk about love) in both secular and religious culture; changes in relations between women and men; the flowering of vernacular literature, especially but by no means solely lyric poetry; and even the discovery or alleged discovery of the individual.1 The century calls to mind xiii 1. The expression “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” owes its existence and dissemination to Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937), The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927). To bring Haskins’s findings closer to the present day, an invaluable collection (linked explicitly with the earlier contrasts and clashes in thought, such as nominalism and realism, reason and faith, and dialectic and Platonism. In all of these developments and debates the title character of this book played a role, sometimes on center stage. Peter Abelard (1079–1142) ranks among the best-known thinkers , teachers, and personages of the entire medieval period. Although he is often designated tout court as Abelard (also spelled in English as “Abaelard” and “Abailard”) and will be called so here, that name appears to be a cognomen he acquired only during or after his student years.2 A person wishing to refer to him formally in his own day would have addressed him by the Latin Petrus or magister Petrus. Beyond being a logician, philosopher, and theologian of the first order, Abelard earned fame as a poet and songwriter.3 His reputation has only been enhanced by the controversy he provoked, both through the shocking outcome of the affair he had with a young woman who had been entrusted to him for private inbook ) is Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). 2. For a list of thirty-seven medieval spellings of the name, see David E. Luscombe , The School of Peter Abelard:The Influence of Abelard’sThought in the Early Scholastic Period, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought: New Series 14 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 315. On the nickname, see Constant J. Mews, “In Search of a Name and Its Significance: A Twelfth-Century Anecdote about Thierry and Peter Abaelard,” Traditio 44 (1988): 175–200; repr. in Mews, Reason and Belief in the Age of Roscelin and Abelard, Variorium Collected Studies CS730 (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate , 2002). 3. On his logic and philosophy, the best starting place is John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On his achievements as a theologian, a compact introduction is furnished by Jean Jolivet, La théologie d’Abélard (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1997). On Heloise’s and Abelard’s accomplishments and reputations in literature, some fundamental works by Peter Dronke have been gathered in his Intellectuals and Poets in Medieval Europe, Storia e letteratura: Raccolta di studi e testi 183 (Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1992), 247–342. On what can be discerned of his skills in music, see Lorenz Weinrich, “Peter Abaelard as Musician I” and “Peter Abaelard as Musician II,” Musical Quarterly 55 (1969): 295–312 and 464–86, and Gerard Le Vot, “Que savons-nous sur la musique des Planctus d’Abelard?,” in Paul Zumthor, trans., Abélard. Lamentations. Histoire de mes malheurs. Correspondance avec Héloïse, Babel 52 (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1992), 107–22. xiv   general introduct ion struction, Heloise (often rendered as “Eloise” or “Héloïse”), and through his having been tried twice thereafter for heresy in his theological teachings and writings.4 Although his encounters with the...