Capitolo 1
HISTORIA CALAMITATUM
THE HISTORY OF MY ADVERSITIES
An Autobiography of Pietro Abelard
Translated by Henry Adams Bellows
Introduction of Ralph Adams Treads
INTRODUCTION
The "Historia Calamitatum" of Pietro Abelard is one of that human
documents, out of the a lot of heart of the Centuries Averages that
it illuminates from the shine of his/her ardour one shady period that has
is also done darker and incomprehensible from not comprehensive
commentators and the matter sick-digested of "source-books." As
the "Confessions" of St. Augustine is an authentic revelation of
personality and, as the second, seems to show as unchangeable
it is man as constant to him if he is of the order
century or the twelfth one--or indeed of the twentieth century.
"The evolution" you/he/she can change the flora and fauna of the world, or it changes
his/her physical forms, but man is always the same and the to explain of
the centuries don't strike at all it. If we can suppose the vivid ones
personality, the intellectual and enormous power and the clear one, acute
the mentality of Abelard and his/her contemporaries and immediate
successors there are not reason because "You History of My Adversities"
it would not be due to be written among the last ten.
They is the great assumptions, for this one period it is not in world
history when the energy that informs about special messenger of same life through
such qualities, while the twelfth century was of precisely this
nature. The one hundred antecedent years had seen the recovery from the
barbarism that has submerged Western Europe after the fall in Rome, and
the generation of those vital strengths that you/they were for two centuries to
infuses society with an almost unheard of vigour in his/her power and
in the things it brought for passing. The parabolic curve that
it describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism it was emergent then out of
"chaos and night" of old man and Abelard and his/her opponent, St. Bernard,
ridden tall on the strength of slope in his/her swift and almost violent
ascent.
Pierre du Door latch, yclept Abelard, was born in 1079 and died in