A 12th-century influencer
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From Ada Palmer, "Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age":
The new scholastic method was so exciting! that when Peter Abelard got kicked out of his monastery (for proving its founding saint didn’t exist—that pissed off the abbot, who’d have guessed?) and went to live as a hermit in the wilderness of Champagne, 100,000 people flocked there to form a tent city and listen to him teach. Abelard’s crowd wasn’t bigger than Woodstock but it was twice the size of Paris at the time, ample to make France fear that crowd + superstar preacher => private army? Later, when Thomas Aquinas was up for sainthood, his advocates argued that every single chapter in his Summa Theologica should be considered an individual miracle, and the judges agreed. (It’s official folks, 3,000+ miracles in one compact paperback, only \$12.99! Unless you want to buy it in the period, in which case it’s \$650,000; you don’t get scholarship before the printing press unless wealthy elites believe it’s really, really worth the \$\$\$!)
Of course that's just a crumb from the loaf of Abelard's story, but Palmer's focus in that passage is on scholasticism — her chapter 23 on that topic is here.
If you enjoyed that fragment, you should read the whole thing. There are 66 other chapters, including chapter 59, "We Can't Just Abelard Harder Anymore", which starts like this:
In 1123, Peter Abelard attracted Woodstock-sized crowds using The Philosopher (Aristotle) to make two seemingly contradictory authorities agree. In the 1260s The Theologian Thomas Aquinas demonstrated this wedding of authorities even more potently, and all supporting Christianity. In 1345, the circle of scholar-friends of whom the Black Death spared few but Petrarch read Cicero’s so-Christian-seeming moral works, and spread the dream of tracking down more missing scraps of Lady Philosophy’s torn gown. It would all fit together, they were sure, as one saw from how much Plato, Aristotle, and (pseudo-) Dionysius agreed with Augustine. Cue book-hunting Poggio, Filelfo, and Aurispa trekking out. Cue retranslation, as master philologists like Lorenzo Valla, Pomponio Leto, and Poliziano give us a larger and stranger classical canon (we were so wrong about what Aristotle said!). Cue our charismatic genius Pico Abelarding harder than any man dared Abelard before, merging Kabbalah, Zoroaster, and the Koran, held together with Platonic baling wire. They must agree, they’re wise, and Plato and Aquinas both say all wise people are trying to paint wordportraits of the same truth glimpsed from slightly different angles.
Ada Palmer, the bright-eyed bushy-tailed grad student, found my Renaissance buddies Abelarding hard like this as I trekked through the archives seeking what they said about Lucretius. Some claimed Lucretius doesn’t really deny the immortal soul, offering other interpretations of those lines, or saying he wrote those sections while ill and temporarily insane, or that a wholesome Roman like Lucretius (friends with Cicero!) never believed such things but was repeating things Epicurus had said, who was farther from Christianity so more confused. But Lucretius is very hard to Abelard, it gets awkward, and half the commentaries resort to saying he was intermittently insane, to explain the times he gazed away from the True Subject of the universal portrait and started doodling these wacky atoms. As trips to Greece and back brought home more books, Lucretius was far from the only nail that refused to be hammered down.
Laura Morland said,
June 11, 2025 @ 2:07 pm
Thanks for sharing "to abelard," the new verb of the month! Note to AP: the grammarians will insist that it be spelled with a lower-case "a". (Verbs are never capitalized, not even in German, I don't believe.)
And although it made me smile to read it, this excerpt reminded me of why someone once invented the phrase "breathless prose".
KevinM said,
June 11, 2025 @ 5:37 pm
Uhhh… to "Abelard" someone might mean something very painful.
Tim Rowe said,
June 11, 2025 @ 6:34 pm
Surely the "something painful" would be "to be abelarded", not "to abelard"? Though if "to abelard" relates to his relationship with Heloïse then it might still lead to dismissal for serious academic misconduct…
rvc said,
June 11, 2025 @ 9:47 pm
I'm a complete layman on the period, but doesn't 100,000 people sound wildly improbable? As cool as it would be if it were true…
J.W. Brewer said,
June 11, 2025 @ 10:45 pm
I agree that "to abelard" is a useful verb. But what is its antonym? By which I mean an approach to intellectual history that rather than trying improbably hard to fully reconcile pagan Greco-Roman authors with their explicitly Christian successors instead tries improbably hard to deprecate the first dozen or thereabouts centuries of those successors as a complete wrong turn or dead end who were merely wasting time until the purity of Plato/Aristotle/whomever* could be returned to free of later accretions.
Stephen Greenblatt's IMHO preposterously overpraised 2011 book about Lucretius would be a good example of this phenomenon, which runs back through Victorian-village-atheist rhetoric to probably various polemical Frenchmen of the 18th century or earlier. To be clear, I expressly do not propose Prof. Greenblatt's surname for verbing in order to come up with the appropriate antonym. I just thought of the example because someone had said "Lucretius."
* lumping (pseudo-)Dionysus in with those dudes strikes me as very weird but whatevs.
Allen W. Thrasher said,
June 12, 2025 @ 7:22 am
I recall a discussion on some list-serve with people who’d studied the matter, and a whole book on the issue of premodern statistics, neither of which I can retrieve now, concluding that with numbers before some very recent century above the low five figures, one can begin by knocking off the last digit. So should it be 10,000 rather than 100,000? How in the world would the latter be fed?
Though I wonder if Chinese high numbers might be pretty accurate, considering the centralized bureaucracy.
Peter Grubtal said,
June 12, 2025 @ 8:37 am
The "Good Science" post, I had to give up on on reaching the Tank Namara cartoon: altogether too US-culture centric, I didn't even get the "stat" bit let alone the MLB.
Ada Palmer's prose in this post seems a ridiculous attempt to stew as many high-culture references as possible in a sauce of pretentious new-agey prose which verges on the unintelligible (perhaps again it's more easily digestible for US readers).
J.W. Brewer : perhaps because I was not terribly familiar with Lucretius and Poggio, I really enjoyed Greenblatt's book. In the end it's possible his conclusions (kick-starting the renaissance) are over-stated, but – only connect – Lucretius-> Montaigne-> Shakespeare – for those of us less erudite, it was a wonderful trip.