The Repentant Abelard Family, Gender, and Ethics in Peter Abelard's Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus

by Ruys, Juanita Feros

• ISBN13: 9780312240028
• ISBN10: 0312240023
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-12-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Abelard was one of the greatest thinkers of the twelfth century, a man of towering brilliance and arrogance, but his poetic works written late in life for his wife Heloise and son Astrolabe reveal a different and more humble man. In the Planctus and the Carmen ad Astralabium we see a man newly coming to terms with the life around him, expressing a simple but heartfelt piety, raging against social injustices and the exploitation of the poor, and re-evaluating the importance of rhetoric and education. Most significantly, we find a man struggling to comprehend, through poems written to the wife and child he abandoned, the divine mysteries of love, relationships, and family.

Author Biography

Juanita Feros Ruys is a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. John O. Ward is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Sydney.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Reconsidering Genre

Excursus: The Music of the Planctus --Dr. Ann Buckley

Reconsidering Theology

Reconsidering Ethics

Reconsidering Didacticism

Reconsidering the Family