Table of Contents
Introduction to Astralabe son of Abelard
In the autumn of 1118, a woman in labour was sheltered in a house in Le Pallet, a small Breton settlement ten miles east of Nantes. She was not Breton and she had not come willingly. Héloïse, the most learned woman in Paris and the secret wife of the most celebrated philosopher in Europe, had been sent there by a man who had every reason to hide both her and the child she was about to deliver. Peter Abelard‘s response to her pregnancy had been practical: removal to Brittany, to his family, where the birth could happen quietly. The child was born and Héloïse named him Astralabe, after the astronomical instrument used to chart the position of stars. Then she returned to Paris and was persuaded into a convent, Abelard was castrated by her uncle’s men, and the boy was left in Le Pallet with Abelard’s sister. He was not yet a week old and was already, in every meaningful sense, an orphan.
This is where the story of the Astralabe son of Abelard and Héloïse begins. It is a story almost entirely missing from the English-language web, despite the fact that the family he was born into is one of the most thoroughly documented minor noble families of twelfth-century Brittany, and despite the fact that the career he eventually made for himself left a traceable trail across three French and Swiss archives.
The family he was left with
The house in Le Pallet where Héloïse gave birth belonged, in one form or another, to the family of Daniel du Pallet. Daniel’s castle dominated Le Pallet, a village on the banks of the fast-flowing Sèvre, only ten miles south of Nantes. Daniel’s daughter Lucie was married to her father’s chief knight and garrison commander, Berengar, and in 1079 she bore him their first child, a boy they called Peter, later known as Peter Abelard. More children followed: Rudalt, Porcar, Dagobert, and finally a daughter, Denise.
The genealogical picture that emerges from Abelard’s own writings and from the Necrology of the Paraclete, the death commemoration book that Héloïse kept at her convent, is more detailed than is often recognised. In the dedication to his Dialectica, probably written before 1121, Abelard refers to “my brother Dagobert” and “my nephews.” Dagobert, who had legitimate sons and therefore by implication a wife, was most likely the brother who inherited the family property after Abelard renounced his inheritance to pursue philosophy. The nephews Abelard mentions are the children of that inheritance: the next generation of the Le Pallet line, named nowhere but present in the record as a fact.
A charter of 1138 names a “Mein de Palatio” as a witness to an agreement between the nuns of Saint-Sulpice-de-la-Forêt and the monks of Saint-Sergius and Saint-Bacchus at Anjou. He is the right age to be Dagobert’s son, and the fact that this same nunnery appears in the Necrology of the Paraclete suggests that a kinswoman of the Le Pallet family was a nun there, with Mein witnessing the deed as her legal guardian. It is a thin thread, but it is the kind of thread that anchors a family to a place and a moment in a way that genealogy researchers can follow.
The Necrology of the Paraclete also records Lucie, Abelard’s mother, but not his father Berengar, which may indicate that Berengar was already dead before 1129 when the register begins, or simply that he made no donation to the convent. Denise, Abelard’s sister, appears as well. It was Denise who took in Héloïse during the pregnancy and who fostered the infant Astralabe in the years that followed.
The boy in Brittany
Shortly after the birth of their child, Héloïse and Abelard were both cloistered. Their son was thus brought up by Abelard’s sister Denise at Abelard’s childhood home in Le Pallet. What Astralabe’s childhood actually looked like is not recorded. He grew up in a minor noble household, in a Breton-speaking region, in the shadow of parents whose story he would have heard from the people who raised him. His father, by the time Astralabe was old enough to know him, was an increasingly embattled monk who had taken on the abbacy of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, a monastery on the remote Breton coast where the monks disliked him and made several attempts on his life. His mother was the abbess of the Paraclete, near Nogent-sur-Seine, three days’ ride from Le Pallet.
The exchange of letters between Héloïse and Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, after Abelard’s death in 1142, confirms that Astralabe had been educated for the church, was actively seeking a position in a collegiate church, and was still alive in 1143. Peter the Venerable, one of the most powerful churchmen in Europe, wrote to Héloïse with characteristic warmth: he would gladly use his influence to obtain a prebend in one of the great churches for her Astralabe, who was, he added, “also ours for your sake.” It is the kind of sentence that tells you more about the human situation than any formal document: a woman who had spent twenty years in a convent she had entered under duress was still, in her mid-forties, trying to secure her son’s future through the connections of the men who had surrounded his father.
The uncle who shaped his career
The key to understanding how Astralabe eventually found his place in the ecclesiastical world is a man named Porchaire. Porchaire, a Poitevin name, was a canon of the Cathedral of Nantes before becoming a monk at the Cistercian abbey of Busay, probably after Bernard of Clairvaux’s second visit to Nantes in 1143. The charter of Busay names both Astralabe and Porchaire together, and the evidence suggests that Astralabe was groomed by his uncle to take over his canonry at the cathedral, possibly becoming its precentor.
Busay, also known as Buzay, had been founded in 1135 at the request of Ermengarde, Duchess of Brittany, with Bernard of Clairvaux’s direct involvement: Bernard’s own brother Nivard served as prior there. The connection places Astralabe within a web of Cistercian patronage that ran directly from the ruling house of Brittany to the most influential religious reformer of the century. It also explains something that might otherwise seem puzzling: how the illegitimate son of a disgraced philosopher and a nun ended up with a respectable career in the church at all. He had an uncle with the right connections, and that uncle used them.
Another figure who likely smoothed Astralabe’s path was Bernard of Escoublac, a former dean of the cathedral chapter who became a monk at Clairvaux before being appointed bishop of Nantes, a position he held from 1147 to 1169. A dean turned bishop who had passed through Clairvaux was precisely the kind of man who could confirm a young canon in his position and ease his progress through the cathedral chapter’s internal politics.
Canon of Nantes, abbot of Hauterive
A “Petrus Astralabius” is recorded at the Cathedral of Nantes in 1150. The same name appears later at the Cistercian abbey of Hauterive in what is now Switzerland. Given the extreme eccentricity of the name, it is almost certain that both references are to the same person.
The move from a canonry at Nantes to the abbacy of a Cistercian house in the Fribourg region is less abrupt than it might appear. Astralabe became a monk at Cherlieu, the motherhouse of Hauterive, before going to its daughter house in Switzerland, where he served as its fourth abbot between 1162 and 1165. Hauterive had been founded in 1138 in the valley of the Glâne river, a community still in its first generation when Astralabe arrived to lead it. The abbey church that stands there today, substantially rebuilt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, is one of the best-preserved Cistercian buildings in Switzerland and can still be visited.
What happened to Astralabe after 1165 the record does not say. The abbacy at Hauterive ended, and he either died or moved on, and if he moved on, where he went has not been established. He took no wife and had no legitimate children; the Le Pallet line, insofar as it can be traced through Astralabe, ends with him. The line that continued was Dagobert’s.
The Carmen: a father’s advice to a son he barely knew
Before Astralabe was old enough to read it, Abelard had written him a poem. The Carmen ad Astralabium, a collection of moral verses in the tradition of the classical wisdom poem, has survived. It is addressed to his son directly, in the second person, and it reads with a specific melancholy when you know the circumstances: a man who had handed his child to his sister and never retrieved him, writing advice for a life he would not be present to guide. The verses cover conduct, the management of anger, the importance of choosing friends carefully, the relationship between learning and virtue. They are competent and occasionally sharp. They are not, by any measure, the work of the Abelard who demolished William of Champeaux in public disputation. They are the work of a man trying to be useful across a distance he could not close.
Héloïse kept the poem at the Paraclete. It survived because she preserved it.
Genealogy research note: tracing the Le Pallet and Nantes connections
Researchers with Breton ancestry, particularly from the area around Nantes, the Loire-Atlantique, and the Vendée, may find the Le Pallet family genealogically useful as a locating document even where direct descent cannot be established. The family’s connections to the cathedral chapter of Nantes, the ducal court of Brittany, and the Cistercian foundations of Busay and Hauterive provide anchor points across three generations and two countries.
The Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique in Nantes hold the surviving records of the Cathedral chapter of Nantes, which include chapter acts, prebend records, and necrology documents from the medieval period. The Nantes cathedral records from the twelfth century are fragmentary but not entirely absent, and a researcher tracing a family with connections to the Nantes clergy in the twelfth or thirteenth century should contact the archives directly at archives.loire-atlantique.fr. The finding aid for the chapter records is available in the reading room.
The Abbey of Hauterive in the canton of Fribourg, Switzerland, maintains its own archive, and the abbey is an active Cistercian community that has published a history of its abbots. Its records from the twelfth century have been partially transcribed and published in the Fontes Rerum Bernensium and in the Regeste Fribourgeois. Researchers with Swiss or Franco-Swiss ancestry from the Fribourg region may find the Hauterive records a useful entry point into the broader Cistercian network of the period. The Staatsarchiv des Kantons Fribourg (fr.ch/sta) holds the principal cantonal records and can advise on access to the abbey archive.
For the Paraclete itself, the departmental archives of the Aube (archives-aube.fr) hold records from the community Héloïse built near Nogent-sur-Seine. The Necrology of the Paraclete, which names members of Abelard’s family including Lucie, Denise, and Peter Astralabe, has been transcribed and published in scholarly editions. For researchers tracing families from the Champagne region with connections to the Cistercian or Benedictine networks of the twelfth century, the Paraclete necrology is one of the more specific documentary resources available.
The Logic Museum’s online article “Peter Abelard: Some notes towards a family tree” (logicmuseum.com) provides the most accessible English-language synthesis of the documentary evidence for the Le Pallet family and should be the first stop for any researcher approaching this material without specialist medieval Latin.
Named individuals index for Astralabe son of Abelard
| Name | Dates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Astralabe (Petrus Astralabius) | c.1118–after 1165 | Son of Peter Abelard and Héloïse; canon of Nantes c.1150; fourth abbot of Hauterive 1162–1165 |
| Peter Abelard | 1079–1142 | Philosopher; Astralabe’s father; author of the Carmen ad Astralabium |
| Héloïse d’Argenteuil | c.1100–1164 | Scholar and abbess of the Paraclete; Astralabe’s mother |
| Berengar of Le Pallet | fl. late 11th century | Knight and lord of Le Pallet; Abelard’s father; Astralabe’s paternal grandfather |
| Lucie (Lucia) of Le Pallet | fl. late 11th–early 12th century | Daughter of Daniel du Pallet; Abelard’s mother; Astralabe’s paternal grandmother |
| Daniel du Pallet | fl. late 11th century | Lord of Le Pallet; Lucie’s father; Astralabe’s great-grandfather |
| Dagobert of Le Pallet | fl. early 12th century | Abelard’s brother; inherited the family property; had sons (Abelard’s “nephews”) |
| Raoul (Rudalt) of Le Pallet | fl. early 12th century | Abelard’s brother |
| Denise of Le Pallet | fl. early 12th century | Abelard’s sister; sheltered Héloïse during her pregnancy; fostered Astralabe in infancy |
| Mein de Palatio | fl. 1138 | Witnessed a charter at Saint-Sulpice-de-la-Forêt; possibly Dagobert’s son and Astralabe’s cousin |
| Porchaire | fl. mid-12th century | Abelard’s uncle (or Astralabe’s great-uncle); canon of Nantes; monk at Busay; groomed Astralabe for his canonry |
| Bernard of Escoublac | d. 1169 | Former dean of Nantes cathedral; Cistercian monk at Clairvaux; bishop of Nantes 1147–1169 |
| Peter the Venerable | c.1092–1156 | Abbot of Cluny; sheltered Abelard in his final illness; interceded with Héloïse for Astralabe’s career |
| Conan III of Brittany | c.1095–1148 | Duke of Brittany; Abelard visited him when ill in Nantes c.1130–32; lord over Le Pallet |
| Ermengarde of Brittany | c.1070–1147 | Duchess of Brittany; founded Busay at Bernard of Clairvaux’s direction; patron of the Cistercian network in which Astralabe moved |
| Nivard of Clairvaux | c.1100–c.1150 | Bernard of Clairvaux’s brother; prior at Busay |
Further reading on Astralabe son of Abelard
Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique: direct link from the genealogy research note for researchers tracing Nantes cathedral records.
Staatsarchiv des Kantons Fribourg: link from the genealogy research note for Hauterive abbey records.
Archives départementales de l’Aube: link from the genealogy research note for the Paraclete necrology.
Logic Museum, “Peter Abelard: Some notes towards a family tree”: this is a legitimate academic resource and the best available free English-language synthesis of the genealogical evidence.
Abbaye de Hauterive official site: the abbey is an active community with a published history and public visiting hours; a legitimate heritage link.
