‘God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself. I wanted simply you, nothing of yours’

The story of the doomed relationship between Abelard and Heloise is one of the world’s most celebrated and tragic love affairs. It is told through the letters of Peter Abelard, a French philosopher and one of the greatest logicians of the twelfth century, and his gifted pupil Heloise. Through their impassioned writings unfolds the story of a romance, from its reckless, ecstatic beginnings through to public scandal, an enforced marriage and its devastating consequences. These eloquent and intimate letters express a vast range of emotions from adoration and devotion to reproach, indignation and grief, and offer a timeless and moving analysis of love.

This is a revised edition of Betty Radice’s acclaimed translation, in which Michael Clanchy, the biographer of Abelard, provides new notes and introductory guidance through recent scholarship concerning the authenticity of these letters.  This volume comprises Abelard’s remarkable autobiography and the subsequent correspondence between Heloise and Abelard, including his spiritual advice to her and her nuns, together with the letters of Peter the Venerable concerning them.

Cumulatively [the volumes] are of increasing value as repositories of scholarship on the multi-dimensional subject of knighthood ... highly informative and useful. ALBION Studies treating a wide variety of aspects of knighthood. Topics include the way in which the word "knight" has been used, studying the terminology and ritual concerned with "making a knight"; the circumstances and implications ofthe knighting of the social elite of England between 1066 and 1272; the difficulties of distinguishing between knight and clerk, as exemplified by Abelard's multi-faceted image; the debt which Geoffrey de Charny's treatise on chivalry owes to the ideas and ideals of knighthood in Arthurian prose romances; and the linguistic competence of the twelfth-century knightly classes as courtly audience of troubadour song. There are also important contributions onthe warhorse; and on the fortifications of fourteenth-century English towns, arguing that they were more the expression of bourgeois aspirations than a response to serious military threat. Professor STEPHEN CHURCH teaches in the Department of History, University of East Anglia; Dr RUTH HARVEY is lecturer in French, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College. Contributors: RICHARD BARBER, MATTHEW BENNETT, JONATHAN BOULTON, MICHAEL CLANCHY, CHARLES COULSON, RUTH HARVEY, ELSPETH KENNEDY, AD PUTTER

Studies in economic, political and social history in 13c England. This latest volume in the series of selected proceedings of the conferences on thirteenth-century England, held biennially at Newcastle upon Tyne since 1985, contains fourteen papers given at the 1993 conference, most of them modified and expanded from their oral versions. As previously, they range widely over a variety of topics, embracing aspects of the political, legal, administrative, economic, religious and social history of the period, from merchantsand trade in medieval England to hagiographical writings and the role of the household knights of Edward I; there is also an important historiographical introductory essay considering past and present approaches to the study of thirteenth-century England, and indicating possible trends in the future. Contributors: M.T. CLANCHY, PHILIP MORGAN, RUTH INGAMELLS, ROBERT BARTLETT, BRIAN GOLDING, ANDREW H. HERSHEY, SCOTT L. WAUGH, JAMES MASSCHAELE, R.H.BRITNELL, W.M. ORMROD, ANDREW F.McGUINNESS, R. MALCOLM HOGG, MICHAEL BURGER, A.A.M. DUNCAN