Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/American Libraries. See https://archive.org/details/peterabelard00mccaiala Transcriber’s note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Small capitals are represented in upper case as in SMALL CAPS. Footnotes have been numbered in a single series. Each footnote is placed at the end of the paragraph which includes its anchor. PETER ABÉLARD All rights reserved Copyrighted in America PETER ABÉLARD by JOSEPH McCABE Author of ‘Twelve Years in a Monastery,’ etc. [Illustration] London Duckworth and Co. 3 Henrietta Street, W.C. 1901 Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, (late) Printers to Her Majesty PREFACE 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.