Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"As a lecturer in the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris, he became tutor to Heloise, the seventeen-year-old niece of a canon, Fulbert. . . . [T]hey fell in love, had a son, and were secretly married. But Fulbert took terrible revenge and had Abelard castrated. On Abelard's bidding, Heloise became a nun while he entered a monastery." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "For over forty years, Abelard had lived and breathed language. He had spent his teens studying the works of Aristotle in Paris and sharpening his skill with words: 'I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all other teachings of philosophy,' Abelard wrote, of his own early years, 'and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.'" [Renaissance World, p. 49, 52] "For Abelard, and for many of his students, the possibility, perhaps even the necessity, of contradiction clearly existed in God’s perplexing and often difficult universe. With his insistence that faith needed to be subject to rigorous rational scrutiny, a novel and threatening idea in his circles at that time, Abelard almost uncannily anticipated the intellectual upheaval that came to dominate Europe a few years later." [Ornament of the World, p. 182]