Lost Love Letters? A Controversy in Retrospect

Abstract

XVII + 378 pp.Peter Abelard belongs to that small group of philosophers (other members include Socrates, Augustine, Boethius and Wittgenstein) whose life-stories are intimately bound up with the public perception of their philosophy. Until recently, indeed, the events of Abelard's life have tended to put his philosophical thinking into the shade. In the Middle Ages, his reputation was that either of the heretical opponent of Bernard of Clairvaux, condemned by the Council of Sens, or of the lover of Heloise. The first edition of his writings (1616) centred on his autobiographical Historia Calamitatum, the correspondence with Heloise that ensued and the works he wrote for her; and, although from the early nineteenth-century, there were some scholarly sceptics who doubted the authenticity of the correspondence, the fantasies woven from these texts by poets and novelists from Alexander Pope to Helen Waddell fixed Abelard's popular image. Only with the complete edition of his logical works (his masterly Dialectica was not published in full until 1956) 1 and the careful analysis of his sophisticated arguments in them has Abelard's power, breadth and originality as a philosopher begun to be visible through this romantic fog. Although most specialists now accept the letters between Abelard and Heloise as genuine, they attempt to interpret them according to the conventions of medieval letter-writing and in the light of Abelard's other writings, so that an understanding of his life-story is able to illuminate his thinking, rather than over-shadow it.

Lluís Nicolau d'Olwer i la "Tràgica història" d'amor de Pere Abelard i Heloïsa

“…Per a un status quaestionis dels problemes relacionats amb l'autenticitat de l'epistolari i la seva bibliografia bàsica, vegeu:Marenbon, 2000, pp. 82-93;2008; Mews, 1999, pp. 43-53; 2005, pp.…”