Peter Abélard

Joseph McCabe's life of Peter Abélard restores to vivid focus one of the Middle Ages' most brilliant and embattled minds. Drawing on Abélard's own letters, Heloise's correspondence, and the testimony of figures such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Peter the Venerable, McCabe combines scholarship with a personal familiarity with monastic, scholastic, and ecclesiastical life to offer a fuller, more sympathetic portrait than earlier sketches allowed. The book follows Abélard from his rise in early medieval Paris, where cathedral schools, abbeys, and political power crowded a small but intellectually electric city, to his fierce rivalry with William of Champeaux over the problem of universals and the making of scholastic philosophy. It then traces the turbulence of his later career: his uneasy place in a royal abbey, his clash with the monks of St. Denis over the relic legend of St. Denis, and the political storm that followed when theology, pride, and court intrigue collided. Sent into exile and back to Champagne, Abélard emerges as philosopher, theologian, lover, and controversial churchman in a story of enduring intellectual and human drama. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.