Abstract

Although Abelard's Story of Calamities has long been regarded as the most original and significant of mediaeval autobiographies, it has also remained in many ways the most perplexing and the most often misunderstood. Setting out ostensibly to console an unidentified friend by writing about the calamities he himself had suffered, Abelard surveyed in his letter the most important phases and events of his career, from his early years to what seemed to him the unparalleled series of misfortunes that formed the pattern of his later life. In the course of his “story,” he told us more about himself, more deliberately, than any other Western thinker between St Augustine and Petrarch, and much, incidentally, about the world in which he moved. For these reasons, Abelard's autobiographical letter is, as Knowles remarks, “a work of the highest value for its historical, psychological and human interest,” indispensable, in fact, to all students of the intellectual and spiritual life of his age. Yet at the same time, as Knowles goes on to say, the Story of Calamities presents most acutely, “as might be expected from its author's character and career, all the difficulties of interpretation which are inseparable from the autobiographical form.” jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); })