Abelard & Heloise: 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 Writingsfeatures an accurate and stylistically faithful new  translation of bothThe Calamities of Peter Abelardand 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 theThe Calamitiesand 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'sConfession of Faith, letters between Heloise and Peter the  Venerable, the Introduction toThe 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."A welcome bundle of texts, in an English that seeks to recreate in its  style the artful elegance of the originals."--Jan Ziolkowski,Department of Classics, Harvard University