The Project Gutenberg EBook of Historia Calamitatum, by Peter Abelard

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Title: Historia Calamitatum

Author: Peter Abelard

Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #14268]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORIA CALAMITATUM ***

Produced by Nicole Apostola

HISTORIA CALAMITATUM

THE STORY OF MY MISFORTUNES

An Autobiography by Peter Abelard

Translated by Henry Adams Bellows

Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram

INTRODUCTION

The "Historia Calamitatum" of Peter Abelard is one of those human
documents, out of the very heart of the Middle Ages, that
illuminates by the glow of its ardour a shadowy period that has
been made even more dusky and incomprehensible by unsympathetic
commentators and the ill-digested matter of "source-books." Like
the "Confessions" of St. Augustine it is an authentic revelation of
personality and, like the latter, it seems to show how unchangeable
is man, how consistent unto himself whether he is of the sixth
century or the twelfth--or indeed of the twentieth century.
"Evolution" may change the flora and fauna of the world, or modify
its physical forms, but man is always the same and the unrolling of
the centuries affects him not at all. If we can assume the vivid
personality, the enormous intellectual power and the clear, keen
mentality of Abelard and his contemporaries and immediate
successors, there is no reason why "The Story of My Misfortunes"
should not have been written within the last decade.

They are large assumptions, for this is not a period in world
history when the informing energy of life expresses itself through
such qualities, whereas the twelfth century was of precisely this
nature. The antecedent hundred years had seen the recovery from the
barbarism that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and
the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to
infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and
in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that
describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of
"chaos and old night" and Abelard and his opponent, St. Bernard,
rode high on t