The author does not think it necessary to offer any apology for having written a life of AbÉlard. The intense dramatic interest of his life is known from a number of brief notices and sketches, but English readers have no complete presentation of the facts of that remarkable career in our own tongue. The History of Abailard of Mr. Berington, dating from the eighteenth century, is no longer adequate or useful. Many French and German scholars have rewritten AbÉlard’s life in the light of recent knowledge and feeling, but, beyond the short sketches to be found in CompayrÉ, Poole, Rashdall, Cotter Morison, and others, no English writer of the nineteenth century has given us a complete study of this unique and much misunderstood personality. Perhaps one who has also had a monastic, scholastic, and ecclesiastical experience may approach the task with a certain confidence.

In the matter of positive information the last century has added little directly to the story of AbÉlard’s life. Indirectly, however, modern research has necessarily helped to complete the picture; and modern feeling, modern humanism, reinterprets much of the story.

Since the work is intended for a circle of readers who cannot be assumed to have a previous acquaintance with the authorities who are cited here and there, it is necessary to indicate their several positions in advance. The chief sources of the story are the letters of AbÉlard and Heloise. The first letter of the series, entitled the ‘Story of my Calamities,’ is an autobiographical sketch, covering the first fifty years of AbÉlard’s life. To these must be added the letters of St. Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux: of Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny: of Jean Roscelin, canon of CompiÈgne, AbÉlard’s early teacher: and of Fulques of Deuil, a contemporary monk. A number of Latin works written shortly after AbÉlard’s death complete, or complicate, the narrative. The principal of these are: the Vita Beati Bernardi, written by his monk-secretary: the Vita Beati Goswini, by two monks of the period: the De gestis Frederici I. of a Cistercian bishop, Otto of Freising: the Metalogicus and the Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury: and the Vita Ludovici Grossi and De rebus a se gestis of Suger, abbot of St. Denis, and first royal councillor. Many of the chronicles of the twelfth century also contain brief references.

Chief amongst the later French historians is Du Boulai with his Historia Universitatis Parisiensis—‘the most stupid man who ever wrote a valuable book,’ says Mr. R. L. Poole. Amongst other French chroniclers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may mention: De Launoy (De scholis celebrioribus), Dubois (Historia EcclesiÆ Parisiensis), Lobineau (Histoire de Bretagne), FÉlibien (Histoire de l’abbaye de Saint Denys and Histoire de la ville de Paris), Longueval (Histoire de l’Église Gallicane), TarbÉ (Recherches historiques sur la ville de Sens), and, of course, the Histoire littÉraire de la France, Gallia Christiana, and ecclesiastical historians generally.

A large number of ‘lives’ of AbÉlard have been founded on these documents. In French we have La vie de P. AbÉlard of Gervaise, a monkish admirer of the eighteenth century, far from ascetic in temper, but much addicted to imaginative description: the historical essay of Mme. and M. Guizot, prefixed to M. Oddoul’s translation of the letters of AbÉlard and Heloise: the AbÉlard of M. RÉmusat, pronounced by Ste. Beuve himself to be ‘un chef d’oeuvre’: and the Lettres ComplÈtes of M. GrÉard, with a helpful introduction. In German Reuter chiefly discusses AbÉlard as a thinker in his Geschichte der religiÖsen AufklÄrung: Deutsch is mainly preoccupied with his theology in his Peter AbÄlard, but gives an exhaustive study of the last years of his life in AbÄlards Verurtheilung zu Sens: Neander discusses him in his Heilige Bernhard: and Hausrath offers the most complete and authoritative study of his career and character in his recent Peter AbÄlard. In English we have, as I said, the eighteenth-century work of Berington, a small fantastic American version (quite valueless), and the more or less lengthy studies of AbÉlard found in Rashdall’s fine Universities of Europe, Cotter Morison’s Life and Times of St. Bernard (scarcely a judicious sketch), CompayrÉ’s AbÉlard and the Universities (in which the biography is rather condensed), Roger Vaughan’s Life of St. Thomas of Aquin, and Mr. R. L. Poole’s Illustrations of the History of MediÆval Thought (from whom we may regret we have not received a complete study of AbÉlard).

January 31, 1901.