ABSTRACT
Peter Dronke, in the volume which he edited and published in 1988 on Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, emphasized 'New perspectives' in scientific speculation, in speculative grammar and in logic. By renewing the errors of the heresiarchs, Abelard is, therefore, guilty of deviance from orthodoxy. Reason did not replace authority over a long time scale lasting four centuries. Giles Constable has written a popularity of the idea of generational change in the Middle Ages, a ‘gap across which the young cannot easily talk to the old who grew a different world’. A typical clash between masters might arise, therefore, not directly from a quest or otherwise for newness, but from a testing and working-out of assertions and expressions in much-debated areas. Usage, Abelard writes, should not have priority over reason nor custom over truth. The quest for truth – old truth – was more pressing for Abelard than innovation.
