Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ABELARD AND HÉLoÏsE

  Peter Abelard was just thirty years old when Anselm died. Born into a knightly family in Brittany in 1079, he was educated at Tours and went to Paris in about 1100 to join the school attached to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, run by William of Champeaux. Falling out with his teacher, he went to Melun to found a school of his own, and later set up a rival school in Paris on Mont Ste Geneviève. From

1113 he was William’s successor at Notre Dame. While teaching there he took lodgings with Fulbert, a canon of the Cathedral, and became tutor to his niece Héloïse. He became her lover probably in 1116, and when she became pregnant married her secretly. Héloïse had been reluctant to marry, and shortly after the wedding retired to live in a convent. Fulbert, outraged by Abelard’s treatment of his niece, sent two henchmen to his room at night to castrate him. Abelard became a monk in the abbey of St Denis, near Paris, while Héloïse took the veil as a nun at Argenteuil. Our knowledge of Abelard’s life up to this point depends heavily upon a long autobiographical letter which he wrote to Héloïse some years later, History of my Calamities. It is the most lively exercise in autobiography since Augustine’s Confessions.