Talk:Peter Abelard

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, now in the public domain.


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Peter Abelard was a good article nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Reviewed version: June 2, 2006


Contents

[edit] 1911

Frankly, I don't see the point of pasting in stuff from the 1911 encyclopedia. You find it all over Wikipedia and some of it is really bad. In any case, it's all available on the web already so what's the point of reproducing it here? BevRowe 18:26 Apr 3, 2003 (UTC)


[edit] Quasijocando???

I agree with the last message. What is the point of 1911 nonsense? There is a word "Quasijocando" in the text that I haven't a clue what it means. The only references (170, Google, duplicates) on the web are ... you guessed it ... Wikipedia and duplicates.

Methinks there is no such word: Quasijocando.

Another reason the copy should be revisited.

I assume that is Latin for "facetiously" or "kind of jokingly" (or just as it says, "quasi-jokingly"). Probably just the 1911 EB trying to sound erudite. I've never seen that word either, and I guess it doesn't matter now since it is no longer in the text, but I thought I would mention it anyway. Adam Bishop 05:47, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
_ _ There are EB-related hits re Abelard on "quasi jocando", a two-word phrase, so the other may be a scanning error.
_ _ "Quasi" is indeed a Latin word. As to "jocando", tho Pope used it in a Latin phrase, it doesn't look Latin to me -- but perhaps only bcz J was simply a version of I, until the 16th century.
_ _ On the other hand, "Quasi" passed into Italian unchanged, and "jocando" is (i think rarely) used as if it were Italian, in titling music or annotating musical scoring.
_ _ If you were British and in upper-class style in the generation that was still running everything in 1911, Italian opera was part of your life-blood, so "trying to sound erudite" is IMO off the mark.
--Jerzy•t 08:39, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
jocando and iocando are the same word in Latin, that's just an orthographical thing. I guess it would make more sense if it was two words, yeah. Adam Bishop 21:27, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Needs Complete Rewrite

This entire article should be re-written from the ground up by someone who knows Abelard's works. I would suggest that an aspiring philosophy student take up this task. Wikipedians all over would be in your debt. --BenjaminHare 22:39, 2005 May 10 (UTC)

A lot of this article is still unsourced or out of the Britannica. There's an awful lot of romanticization of Abelard and Heloise's relationship and judgments of the meaning of their letters. It's not good scholarship and still needs a rewrite. --Lizzard (talk) 06:06, 4 May 2008 (UTC)


[edit] I will plan on doing so

I am a student in philosophy, currently taking a course in ancient and medieval philosophy. I plan on doing a research paper on Abelard's nominalism. Come winter break I plan on writing up a section on Abelard's nominalism (or "irrealism"). --11/29/05 (10:54 MTN)

[edit] Composer?

Was he a composer, as List of uncategorized composers#A alleges? If his compositions are indeed insufficiently notable for the bio, surely he must be expunged from composer lists.
--Jerzy•t 08:51, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Eternal Sunshine

Could there be a reference to Alexander Pope's poem, "Heloise and Abelard" in the page...

"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot. / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray'r accepted and each wish resign'd."

...which serves as the inspiration for the movie of the same name.

--Chinmay, March 22, 2006

[edit] Neither fish nor fowl

This page has been moved to Peter Abélard, which seems to be a neologistic back-formation from the English/German Peter Abelard. Wikipedia + mirrors are the only hit of this spelling in the first four pages of Google hits. I propose that this page be moved back to Pierre Abélard (the French name), or to the English version Peter Abelard (with a slight preference for the latter, as it has been established in English for some centuries). For a convoluted discussion of this, see User talk:JackyR#That bloke what had it off with Eloise. Otherwise, take it on its merits... JackyR 22:45, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect statuses & history merges

OK, here's what posterity will see (other than later changes:

  1. The non-redirect revision from PeterAbelard and the two of them from Peter Abelard merged in with the 160-ish later revisions of Peter Abélard as the history of Peter Abelard.
  2. All the redirect revisions of PeterAbelard as they are now (actually, having disappeared temporarily but been restored).
  3. Peter Abélard will be a fresh move-tool-created rdr.

(If you like laws, sausages, or fully consolidated WP histories, don't watch them being made. In this case, if you don't look at the deletion logs, you won't see the deletions and undeletions required.)
--Jerzy•t 16:56, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
The merge-&-move involves 13 steps, but the killer one is the wait for the completion of the undeletion that completes the history merge. There hasn't been much activity on the article lately (7 edits in about 9 weeks, so i'm going to go ahead now rather than wait for the quiet hours. If you find the article gone, please be patient: it should be missing less than a half hour, and i think the delays have gotten shorter in recent months.
--Jerzy•t 20:32, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
_ _ In the event, the undeletion was complete in under four minutes, thanks no doubt to further work by our invaluable developers.
_ _ On reflection, i undeleted the 5 rdr-versions of Peter Abelard (see below in this section) before rather than after moving Peter Abélard there, with the result that the rdrs appear as old revisions (instead of being clobbered when i did the move). Their unnatural occurence interspersed with revisions of the article offers some confusion potential (e.g., they look like, but are not evidence of unrepaired cut-and-paste moves). But on the positive size, they do document the sometimes confusing name changes, which were not reflected in the history when the first 4 of the 5 moves were done. Note that they are all former revisions of Peter Abelard, and not (generally? ever?) of the article, but they should reasonably closely track the changes of the article's title, since each was done to bypass an rdr that recently had become part of a dbl rdr. Feedback welcome; remediation is practical if there's a consensus i blew it.
--Jerzy•t 21:47, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Peter Abelard rdrs:
    • 08:04, 14 November 2005 Jerzy (==> #REDIRECT Peter Abélard)
    • 09:51, 22 April 2004 Nixdorf m (corrected name)
    • 11:52, 7 July 2002 Tarquin
    • 16:51, 21 June 2002 The Epopt (link)
    • 15:51, 25 February 2002 Conversion script m (Automated conversion)

[edit] GA Failing

Fails WP:LEAD, has random references in the middle of the text, references need to be connected in the text (please see WP:CITE.) Highway Rainbow Sneakers 15:40, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Recent scholarship

I'm not particularly knowledgeable on Abelard myself, but I do know that there has been some recent scholarship that has made modern philosophers view him as a more significant philosopher than he had previously been considered. In particular, some of his works on logic were first published in the 20th century, and there is now ongoing work on examining them. It may be worth covering both those works and their new philosophical reception, which the article, based mainly on EB1911, currently doesn't mention at all. For an overview, see: John Marenbon, "The rediscovery of Peter Abelard's philosophy", Journal of the History of Philosophy 44(3), 2006 (abstract here). --Delirium 17:30, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I agree

As a Theology student currently doing research on the 1140 Sens Heresy trial, I have never come across this document cited under "Written Works" ""Time Jesum Non Riventum", translated by Betty Radice, c. 1970, this is the superbly accurate transcript of Abelard's document, the one that saw him condemned in 1140 at the Council of Sens for heresy. He was condemned on the basis of other well-known published works such as his "Ethica" and "Theologia" (and wrongly, in my opinion, but that's another issue). I propose to delete that reference unless someone can give a bit more detail about where it can be found. PJO'M 17:42, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, please delete. -- Stbalbach 16:51, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Constant Mews

I have corrected the reference to Constant Mews. Whilst he is an academic at an Australian university, he is in fact British (his bio). On a less trivial point, I have supplied the requested citation for his work on the Lost Love Letters.PJO'M 18:48, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Habeladus/Bajolardus

In the article is the statement that "The name Abaelardus (also written Abailardus, Abaielardus, and in many other ways) is said to be a corruption of Habélardus, substituted by Abélard himself for a nickname ('Bajolardus') given him when a student." Can we have a citation for this please?

Also, if "Bajolardus" was his nickname, what does it even mean? It's not French and seems a rather odd name. —Lowellian (reply) 02:05, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, apparently there's no telling what it meant - this page (http://www.dromo.info/abelardbio.htm), an extract from the New International Encyclopedia (1920), says that "his name is commonly given in the French form, Abélard or Abailard; in Latin, Abailardus or Bajolardus. But these are epithets of uncertain meaning, the latter form perhaps from bajulus, ‘teacher,’ the former from abeille, ‘a bee.’" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.1.121.3 (talk) 02:16, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Standard Usage of Name

I suggest that the spelling of Abelard be "Abelard" without an accent mark. The article has Abelard both with and without an accent mark. Since this is an English site, and Abelard's name has no accent in the Latin, and the standard academic usage is without the accent, we ought to abide by that usage. DoNNNald 16:22, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Agreed and done. What about Heloise? Mak (talk) 18:15, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Heloise should probably be spelled without accents too. In Clanchy's book, he does not use accents. DoNNNald 19:16, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Was Heloise whipped by Abelard for not doing homework?

I am sure most people are more interested in the romance than the philosophy. Is it true that Heloise fell in love with Abelard, after he, acting as her tutor, whipped her naked bottom when her work was not up to scratch? This would be typically French. But if it DID happen, it should certainly have a section devoted to it here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.185.94.226 (talk • contribs)

No it is not true. It is also nonsense. I hope you were not serious. Your comment will be deleted along with my comment in five days, unless reason is given not to delete. DoNNNald 02:26, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

There really isn't much reason not to delete that rather amusing comment, but I suppose it might just be semi-inspired by a passage in Historia Calamitatum 6, which says the following about Fulbert: "[...] he entrusted her wholly to my guidance, begging me to give her instruction whensoever I might be free from the duties of my school, no matter whether by day or by night, and to punish her sternly if ever I should find her negligent of her tasks. In all this the man's simplicity was nothing short of astounding to me; I should not have been more smitten with wonder if he had entrusted a tender lamb to the care of a ravenous wolf. When he had thus given her into my charge, not alone to be taught but even to be disciplined, what had he done save to give free scope to my desires, and to offer me every opportunity, even if I had not sought it, to bend her to my will with threats and blows if I failed to do so with caresses?" But Abelard certainly doesn't ever imply that he had to go that way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 163.1.121.3 (talk) 02:08, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

(Comment deleted by Lizzard (talk) 06:11, 4 May 2008 (UTC)) Notthere (talk) 04:29, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

It's not amusing anymore when it descends into someone's soft core birching fetish. I'm deleting the above comment.--Lizzard (talk) 06:11, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Notthere responds. And I’m reinserting it. Let me remind you that this is the talk page for the Abelard article, not the article itself, and also that the events referred to are matters of record, not inventions of mine. Further, I have directed interested readers to the source, and will make the references more specific in the near future. It is perhaps true that I may derive a certain amount of titillation from visualising these “lessons”, but that small pleasure does not ipso facto mean the material is incorrect or irrelevant. And anyway, who in all honesty, male or female, could not be moved by the scenes Abelard described. Lizzard is a retro feminist and does not wish readers to know that Heloise, the prototypical feminist of the medieval era conspired with her tutor to experience numerous and semi-public bare bottom spanking from him, and moreover grew to love him more passionately for the experience. But then again, what normal woman would not? The passages censored by the Uber Libber, who would wish us all women to go back to being boiler-suited, hairy bodied harridans of the 70s, and will expunge anything that is not politically correct, as determined by her, should go back to that time. Here is the offending passage that Uber Libber does not want you to see.

Ah, but read a little further... He does indeed punish her in exactly that way. Abelard's Historia Calamamitum are almost without peer for their unembroidered honesty, but he is discrete about his role as schoolmaster to the young Heloise. It is obvious from his narrative though, that the two were falling passionately in love, and that love talk, and indeed love making had well nigh totally replaced Latin declensions during their time together, leading to a dearth of noise from within the classroom that those without might have found suspicious. Abelard was moved, according to his own account, to provide the sound effects that traditionally accompany such teaching—the sounds of corporal punishment administered to an inattentive or negligent student. Such punishment was considered an essential component of an education of any quality at all, and it was the universal practice to use a whip or birch on the student's bare bottom. Abelard had been exhorted by Heloise's father not to grant her any special dispensation in this regard on account of her gender, but it is apparent from his description that Abelard did not apply the switch or stick, but only 'gentle blows' which refers to slapping by the open hand. The two hoped that the characteristic sounds of a bare bottom being slapped, and Heloise's attendant cries would allay any suspicion that Fulbert might have had about what was going on inside the classroom. The result was of course, that Heloise came to love him even more intensely, finding the pain to be ‘surpassing the sweetness of all ointments’. Will post full citations later, and add a line to clarify this matter in the article, which has no record of it. Notthere (talk) 06:17, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I'll call an admin on this for arbitration rather than deleting this again. I treated it as I would spam or vandalism. I consider it vandalism of the article to put soft core fetish porn on the talk page. If you want birching go read some Swinburne. There is plenty there!--Lizzard (talk) 07:51, 11 May 2008 (UTC)