Greetings, everyone,
I finally decide two days after my registration to make my little presentation message.
First of all, of course, thank you for welcoming me to your charming community.
I was seduced by the friendly and very courteous atmosphere of your forum whose image of my avatar is, I think, an illustration and I congratulate you for having succeeded in setting up this.
I humbly ask you to forgive me for my simplistic English, because it is not my native language.
I was attracted by a post by PaulRickier in the forum on war and conflict on which I am preparing an answer, but I am mainly interested in how people lived their daily lives in the past and in art and philosophy.
Unfortunately, my professional activity does not leave me much time and I will not be able to post as much as I want in this forum.
Kind regards,
Abelard

Post as often as you like - the more the merrier!  

And you are of course very welcome aboard!

PS. And what a well chosen pseudonym. Any enemy of St Bernard is a friend of mine!

@nordmann
Thank you for your courtesy, why not an introductory thread on the Epistolae duorum amantium rediscovered in 1967 after being forgotten for more than five centuries?
Kind regards,
Abelard

Welcome Abelard.  Anyone on the board can open a thread so you could always jump in and open one.  Of course, we are all different - I have sometimes been surprised what strikes a chord with people and then again things I have found interesting don't always appeal to other people - though don't let that put you off.  I mentioned something about corsets once and a few comments followed (which rather surprised me).

Welcome to the board, Abelard.

Though I have to admit, I had to look you up in wiki:

Peter Abelard

Abelard, I join a bit lately all the others with a warm welcome and I am pleased that you came to this board by my utterings about I suppose WWII. It can be that my Dutch English is worser than your I suppose French English, but we both have the advantage that half of the English words are French and the other half Dutch, although pronounced a bit oddly compared with ours...
And you are not alone, with Dirk and me native Dutch, MM I suppose nearly a Frenchman, a Dane, I suppose a native Spanish translator and last but not least a multilingual Irishman, who has that superb grasp of the English language and as I understood during the years, also Norwegian, a fair grasp of German...and of Greek?...
Kind regards from Paul.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Welcome Abelard.  Anyone on the board can open a thread so you could always jump in and open one.  Of course, we are all different - I have sometimes been surprised what strikes a chord with people and then again things I have found interesting don't always appeal to other people - though don't let that put you off.  I mentioned something about corsets once and a few comments followed (which rather surprised me).

Dear LadyinRetirement,
I do not intend to give precise details of the Abélard-Eloïse relationship but rather to talk about notions such as the vision of love in the Middle Ages, of an outstanding literary work and also of this great lady Eloïse and of her own vision of this relationship.
But first I have to make an answer on a less glamorous subject, if I may say so, Fall Gelb.
I'm less passionate about it, but I try to make a long, relatively precise answer and work according to my skills and time to give to PaulRickier on a specific point.
As I plan to post two videos there, I think I have to wait a week after my registration to be able to do so.
But after that, I promise I'll talk about this subject that interests me a lot more.
Kind regards,
Abelard
Abélard and Heloise painted by E. B. Leighton in 1882

Abelard, I know the story of Abelard and Heloise, though not the epistolae to which you refer - though these days with the internet at one's disposal I guess I don't really have any excuse for not looking them up

Dear Triceratops,
Thank you for welcoming me on board, friendly quadruped.
It seems to me that I have already seen your avatar on Historum that I was looking once in a while  without ever having registered.
Kind regards,
Abelard
Triceratops in Germany

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Abelard, I know the story of Abelard and Heloise, though not the epistolae to which you refer - though these days with the internet at one's disposal I guess I don't really have any excuse for not looking them up

Dear ladyinretirement,
It is a romantic correspondence of 116 medieval letters rediscovered in 1967 and which is attributed to Abélard and Heloïse.
A treasure of medieval literature.
Kind regards,
Abelard

PaulRyckier wrote:

Abelard, I join a bit lately all the others with a warm welcome and I am pleased that you came to this board by my utterings about I suppose WWII. It can be that my Dutch English is worser than your I suppose French English, but we both have the advantage that half of the English words are French and the other half Dutch, although pronounced a bit oddly compared with ours...
And you are not alone, with Dirk and me native Dutch, MM I suppose nearly a Frenchman, a Dane, I suppose a native Spanish translator and last but not least a multilingual Irishman, who has that superb grasp of the English language and as I understood during the years, also Norwegian, a fair grasp of German...and of Greek?...
Kind regards from Paul.

Dear Paul Rickier,
Thanks for your welcome. 
I'm preparing my answer on Hans-Thilo Schmidt, Paillole and other things for Monday or Tuesday at the latest.
Otherwise, I speak French, some English, German, Italian.
See you Monday or Tuesday.
Kind regards,
Abelard

I'd heard a story that a monk called Abelard introduced the concept of zero to England (second explanation under the link in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1358,00.html
but that would appear to be a different Abelard.  I know Peter Abelard became a monk after his misfortune but I don't think he ever came to the sceptred isle.  Of course there would be more than one person with the same name.  I know the internet is not 100% reliable but I have come across mention of the Bakshali Manuscript as the origin of the concept of zero. Hope I'm not derailing the thread (I have sometimes been accused of going off the point on threads).

Lady,

"Hope I'm not derailing the thread (I have sometimes been accused of going off the point on threads)." It is also a peculiarity of mine, but perhaps we can hide now behind the fact that this thread of Abelard is a thread on his own with the title of "Intro" and we are still discussing Abelard's thoughts, perhaps a bit on a sideway ...but we started with the name Abelard...
And yes the history of zero and the Bakshali Manuscript
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/14/much-ado-about-nothing-ancient-indian-text-contains-earliest-zero-symbol


"sceptered isle" I recall vaguely that I already read it, but never understood it quite well, only that I read it as an "island under a scepter" (eiland onder 'n scepter), but now I wanted it to know it "for once and for good"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Sceptred_Isle
"The programme's title is a quotation from Act 2, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's play, King Richard II, attributed to John of Gaunt:

Quote :

"This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars ... This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England".

And now I see: our John of Gaunt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Gaunt
our Jan van Gent and they dare even suppose that he:
"When he became unpopular later in life, scurrilous rumours and lampoons circulated that he was actually the son of a Ghent butcher, perhaps because Edward III was not present at the birth. This story always drove him to fury.^[2] "
I have the impression that the history of England is to a high degree connected with the continental one...

Kind regards, Paul.

Abelard wrote:

Dear Triceratops,
Thank you for welcoming me on board, friendly quadruped.
It seems to me that I have already seen your avatar on Historum that I was looking once in a while  without ever having registered.
Kind regards,
Abelard

I haven't been on Historum for a little while. Though after Nordmanns' latest post , I may have to go back and get things re-organised over there.