Petrus Abaelardus: Sermones. Edited by L. J. Engels and C. Vande Veire

Abstract

This book was not finished when L. J. Engels died in 2017; we owe its completion to the devoted work of a team from Brepols. It was able therefore to contain its own review. In a fine tribute to a scholar distinguished both for his research and for his services to Dutch universities, C. H. Kneepkens (p. vi) justly calls the edition a ‘model of acuity, precision, patience and sheer graft’. (I do not imagine that Engels was responsible for ‘Operus’ in the list of sigla on p. 2.) Engels lavished astonishing care and learning not only on the establishment of the text, but on the identification of Abelard’s sources. In three levels above the traditional apparatus criticus (see pp. lxxxii–lxxxiv), he gave references to the Bible, to patristic and later sources (Augustine and Jerome are naturally prominent here), and internally to similar passages in Abelard’s own works. The indexes...