During the course of his life Abelard played many parts: the ambitious young man, the lover, the monk, the reforming abbot, the heretic. But – as the last chapter has made clear – one role remained constant through all these vicissitudes. Abelard was, above all, a teacher. From the time when, in about noo, hardly more than a teenager, Abelard set up a school in rivalry to William of Champeaux, until about 1140 – apart from his period of illness as a young man (c. 1105–8) and his years at St Gildas (c. 1127–32) – his principal activity was that of teaching his band of enthusiastic pupils. Even his relationship with Heloise ended, as it had ostensibly begun, as a didactic one – with Abelard producing a succession of works in the 1130s for her and her nuns. Much of Abelard's writing is therefore closely related to his activity as a teacher. Rather like that of a teacher or lecturer today, Abelard's work as a master involved both repetition and change. In the Historia (73: 353–4), he remarks revealingly that, while his energies were taken by the affair with Heloise, his lectures (lectio) became careless and lukewarm: instead of using his inventive intelligence (ingenium), he was content to repeat what he had previously discovered. Clearly, then, Abelard covered much the same material from year to year in his teaching in a given area but, when he was not distracted by romance, he was always thinking afresh. Abelard's thought was, therefore, in a state of constant evolution.