Comprehensive and learned translation of these texts affords insight into Abelard's thinking over a much longer sweep of time and offers snapshots of the great twelfth-century philosopher and ...theologian in a variety of contexts.
Textual Transvestism analyzes the flourishing of imitative versions of Heloise's and Abelard's love correspondence in the late 17th and 18th centuries.
This article demonstrates that an economic context is essential to the metaphor that Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard used in their arguments against a ransom theory of atonement. Contrary to ...typical analyses, which suggest their metaphor makes a point about obedience or honour that slaves or servants owe to a master or king, this metaphor in fact suggests relations between the lord of a manor and his servi – serfs bound to the land, perpetually indebted to the lord and effectively considered his property. Should servi attempt to desert their lord, he had the right simply to reclaim them wherever they went. Insofar as this right voided the servus’ choice to leave their lord, the metaphorical framework of manorial economy ruled out the ‘rights of the devil’ in a way previous debt-slavery and military frameworks for ransom theory (in themselves) did not.
Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages: Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet by Peter Godman Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. The fragmented and unfinished way of thinking that ...emerged from this period is of a piece with the contemplative way of life from which its forms of thinking derived, particularly in Benedictine monasteries where thinkers reshaped the age-old tradition of ascetic life as they searched for a new understanding of learnedness, while also debating deviations from the monastic norm. The story of the affair is described in his famous autobiographical work, Historia calamitatum (History of my Misfortunes), to which authors like Petrarch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Madame de Sévigné, and Alexander Pope explicitly refer in their own writings. In the avalanche of change both in society and church of twelfth-century France, a more stringent approach to scholastic scholarship emerged, while monastic learnedness was slowly losing ground in favor of the schools in and around Paris.
Yuri Lotman developed and during his career frequently revisited the concept of “culture as text,” which he demonstrated to be universal. Within the framework of the semiotic approach, culture, ...perceived as a text, is, according to Lotman, a complexly encoded structure. This article attempts to consider confessional texts in the light of Lotman’s semiotic model of culture. Following his methodology, we assume that confessional discourse in natural language historically preceded the speech genre ‘confession’; early Christianity developed confession as a ‘ritualized formula’, after which the ‘ritual’ was transformed into a literary and artistic semiotic model. Literary confession invariably retains the characteristic method of semiotically encoded information throughout its long existence. Moreover, being included in new textual and extra-textual contexts, the confessional text creates new meanings that enrich, complicate, and change its semantics. Adapted to different contexts, confession acquires new functions and new recoding options. Drawing on Lotman, it is possible to see the analogy between the text and the symbolic behavior of the personality, as well as the actualization of the addresser and the addressee in the process of communication both with ‘self’ and with ‘others’.
Despite its importance and the frequent references made to it by modern scholars, this commentary has never before been translated into English in its entirety. This volume, which includes an ...extensive introduction, fills this gap, thus providing a needed contribution to medieval scholarship.
The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of ...hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.
Around the middle decades of the twelfth century, two literary transformations began to take effect in the aristocratic courts of northern Europe, which revolutionized the face of Western literature. ...One was an increasing preference for vernacular over Latin as the primary vehicle of written literary expression; the other was a general change from bellicose subject matter to courtly, chivalric themes. Both of these developments are embodied in the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes. While scholars have long studied the intellectual and social factors motivating the creation of this new courtly literature, they have tended to confine attention to the vernacular sphere without paying due regard to the vibrant Latin traditions of the time, which I argue provided a crucial foundation for the emerging chivalric romance. This intellectual environment, which has come to be known as the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, is well represented in the classicizing tendencies traditionally attributed to the School of Chartres. Another important context for the romance was the emerging Latin corpus of courtly criticism that arose in response to changing social conditions in Henry II’s courts. Both of these trends are exemplified in the Latin treatises of John of Salisbury. By invoking John’s literary, educational, political, and philosophical conceptions as a basis for interpreting the early romances of Chrétien de Troyes, this thesis reveals the necessity for crossing the divide that has customarily been placed between Latin and vernacular spheres if one wishes to attain a more comprehensive understanding of the intellectual and social significance of twelfth-century vernacular literature. Ultimately, considering Chrétien’s works in light of contemporaneous Latin traditions will not only allow us to offer fresh insights concerning his first Arthurian romance, Erec et Enide, but will also help us uncover his purposes in creating this new courtly genre.
The philosophical output of Héloïse d’Argenteuil. This article attempts to deconstruct the overhyped erotic relationship between the philosopher-monk Peter Abelard (1079–1142) and philosopher-nun ...Héloïse d’Argenteuil (ca. 1100–1164), by surveying Héloïse’s extant texts ( Epistolae duorum amantium, Episto lae Heloissae and Problemata Heloissae ) as such, isolating three themes in her philosophical output: her concept of Cicerian love, her criticism of marriage and her notion of moral and material responsibility, which includes her understanding of an ethics of attitude and intention. When Héloïse is read against the grain of the standardised Abelard-reception (which holds Héloïse as at best a productive correspondent of Abelard, yet a mere muse for his extensive academic output), she is brought into perspective as an independent thinker, who deserves more intellectual respect than to be caricaturised as either Abelard’s secret young lover, or his unwilling wife. When her texts are read as independent outputs, albeit often in the form of correspondence, she steps forward as the ‘first female philosopher of the Middle Ages’. Her relationship with Abelard, important as it was for both of them, is secondary to her standing as a philosopher proper.
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