That the problem of Universals was one of the most discussed topics of the twelfth century is an undeniable fact. But to regard it as the keynote of that age, reducing all its activities to a mere concern about that old dispute, as for quite a long time has been the fashion, is as unfair as it is untrue. Recent research has shown beyond dispute that the twelfth century was, on the contrary, an age of extraordinary and comprehensive vigour and witnessed exceptional achievements in all branches of learning. It was indeed the beginning of a new era in the history of Europe and prepared the way, to a large extent, for the “golden age” of the thirteenth century; it was a true “renaissance.” The School of Chartres and John of Salisbury are only two of the striking instances of the general culture of the time.

The most typical figure of the twelfth century, and assuredly the most remarkable one, is Peter Abailard. He is the personification of the genius of that age of quickening and restlessness, with all its virtues and all its defects. Born in 1079 in Britanny at Palais, or Le Pallet, a village near Nantes, from his ancestors he inherited an excellent and prompt disposition to learning. Eager to learn and as quick to assimilate all he had learnt, he excelled in all branches of knowledge, from music to theology, leaving his contemporaries far behind. Mathematics, it seems, was the only science to which he did not feel any inclination: “Ea quoque scientia cuius nefarium est exercitium, quae mathematica appellatur; . . . quia eius artis [arithmeticae] ignarum omnino me cognosco” (Dialect, ed. Cousin, 435, 182). Vain, presumptuous, thinking of himself as the only learned man of his time, of fighting spirit and bitter in criticism of all and sundry, he passed from one school to the other, from Roscelin to William of Champeaux, to Anselm of Laon, only to attack his masters and scorn them to ridicule.