ABSTRACT
Peter Abelard was not a Parisian nor a Frenchman. Nonetheless, the duchy of Brittany, and especially the county of Nantes into which he had been born in 1079, was increasingly open to and taking part in opportunities of all kinds opening up in France. A battle of ideas unquestionably took place in Paris between Abelard and his master William of Champeaux in the early 1100s but personal alliances and quarrels were also involved and the politics of the royal court bore closely upon them. Another persistent objection to the contemporary character of the Historiais that the quotations it contains from the Bible are put in a form not invented before the thirteenth century. In later centuries the nominalist party was to enlarge to the limit the horizon of what is possible to God; that school was to replace fixed laws of nature with varieties of possible worlds.
