The main source for all except the last decade of Abelard's life is his own Historia calamitatum. Recently, some scholars have queried this work's authenticity, but their arguments are unconvincing (see excursus). Although it is Abelard's own composition, the Historia must, none the less, be used with care. Abelard wrote with particular literary and didactic aims in view, exercising a careful control, which was not that of the dispassionate biographer, over what he included, what he emphasized and what he passed over in silence. A range of other evidence can be used to fill in and correct the account in the Historia and throw light on Abelard's last years – contemporary letters and poetry, charters, chronicles and hagiographies. Above all, the wider political and ecclesiastical history of the period helps to put the details of Abelard's life into perspective.

LE PALLET

Peter Abelard was born in 1079 and grew up at Le Pallet, on the very edge of the Duchy of Brittany, only a few miles west of the boundary with Anjou and north of that with Poitou, in easy reach of the towns of the Loire where learning flourished. It is not certain whether Abelard spoke Breton, or whether his family was even Breton in origin. His parents belonged to the minor nobility. Berengar, his father, may have been the castellan of Le Pallet or, more probably, one of the knights who guarded the castle and the castellan in return for small landholdings.