The Letters and Other Writings

The most comprehensive compilation of the works of Abelard and Heloise ever presented in a single volume in English, *The Letters and Other Writings* features an accurate and stylistically faithful new translation of both *The Calamities of Peter Abelard* and the remarkable letters it sparked between the ill-fated twelfth-century philosopher and his brilliant former student and lover-an exchange whose intellectual passion, formal virtuosity, and psychological drama distinguish it as one of the most extraordinary correspondences in European history. Thanks to this edition, Latin-less readers will be better placed than ever to see why this undisputed milestone in the intellectual life of medieval France is also a masterpiece of Western literature. In addition to the *The Calamities* and the letters--the first complete English translation of all seven in more than eighty years--this volume includes an Introduction, a map, and a chronology, Abelard's *Confession of Faith*, letters between Heloise and Peter the Venerable, the Introduction to *The Questions of Heloise*, and selected songs and poems by Abelard, among them a previously untranslated shaped poem, Open Wide Your Eyes. Extracts of lost letters sometimes ascribed to Abelard and Heloise are given in appendixes.