Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- I The Literary Evidence
- II Abelard's Followers
- III The Diffusion of Abelardian Writings
- IV The Condemnation of 1140
- V The Theological Writings of Abelard's Closest Disciples
- VI The School of Laon
- VII Hugh of St Victor
- VIII The Summa Sententiarum
- IX Abelard and the Decretum of Gratian
- X Abelard's Disciples and the School of St Victor
- XI Peter Lombard
- XII Robert of Melun
- XIII Richard of St Victor
- XIV Conclusion
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
II - Abelard's Followers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- I The Literary Evidence
- II Abelard's Followers
- III The Diffusion of Abelardian Writings
- IV The Condemnation of 1140
- V The Theological Writings of Abelard's Closest Disciples
- VI The School of Laon
- VII Hugh of St Victor
- VIII The Summa Sententiarum
- IX Abelard and the Decretum of Gratian
- X Abelard's Disciples and the School of St Victor
- XI Peter Lombard
- XII Robert of Melun
- XIII Richard of St Victor
- XIV Conclusion
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index of Manuscripts
- General Index
Summary
The names of some twenty-one disciples and sometime pupils under Abelard are known. In addition some fourteen anonymous writers composed works of theology or of logic under Abelard's inspiration. Pope Innocent II in 1140 forbad the followers of Abelard to hold or to defend the mistakes of their master and ordered Abelard's writings to be destroyed. The literary evidence surveyed in the last chapter would lead by itself to the conclusion that there was no future in attempting to develop Abelard's theology. Yet there survive today, in addition to copies of Abelard's own writings, eleven theological compositions produced by his followers. The writings of the school are highly important in the history of early scholastic theology and logic but most of them are of obscure or anonymous authorship. All the logical works which in the present state of knowledge can be assigned to Abelard's school are anonymous. Of the theological works, the most central one is not merely anonymous; its existence is only posited by the strong hypothesis of Dr H. Ostlender who considered that the Liber Sententiarum wrongly attributed to Abelard by Bernard of Clairvaux was the work of an anonymous member of the school and acted as the main source for several of the other sentence collections of the school.
Some theological writings of the school do bear their authors' names but the fact is not always a revealing one. One abbot Bernard composed some Sentences c. 1140 but he seemingly cannot be identified with any other known twelfth-century abbot of that name. Master Hermann who is presumed to have written after 1139 the most widely conserved sentence work of Abelard's school is otherwise wholly unknown.
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- Information
- The School of Peter AbelardThe Influence of Abelard's Thought in the Early Scholastic Period, pp. 14 - 59Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1969