ABSTRACT
Beryl Smalley did not devote a section of The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages to Peter Abelard and his name does not loom large in the index. He got only scattered references. She acknowledged that he was an outstanding figure in a period that gave scope to personality, that he was a thoroughgoing dialectician with a sharper mind and a very different temperament from Anselm of Laon whom he found wordy and second-rate. Peter Abelard was both a schoolman and a monk: a schoolman at Melun, Corbeil and on the Mont Ste Geneviève; a monk at St Denis, St Ayoul, the Paraclete, St Gildas, Cluny and St Marcel. His writings reflect both his scholastic and his monastic experiences and commitments; so does his Biblical exegesis. When Abelard wrote his autobiography, he reproduced some examples from this large repertory of gentile seekers after wisdom.
