II - Abelard to Heloise: The History of Women's Roles in Christianity (Letter 7)

Summary

The tragic story of the love of Heloise (d. 1164) and Abelard (1079–1142) is well known, especially for the episode when, following their marriage, Heloise's uncle and guardian, Fulbert, had Abelard castrated. Less well recognized is the fact that after they had both entered the religious life in 1118, Heloise had a career for some thirty years as a successful and respected abbess. Their correspondence, in which both Abelard's replies and the letters from Heloise which occasioned them have been preserved, is the most famous of the Middle Ages. Once celebrated as the letters of two unfortunate lovers, the correspondence is now seen to embrace further dimensions. It is now generally accepted that it is a mutual correspondence, in which Heloise did actually compose the letters attributed to her and actively shaped the nature of the exchange. It is as an exchange between an unusually gifted cleric and abbess regarding the theory and practice of the religious life for women that it features here. The letter translated here (Letter 6 in the numbering of Muckle and Radice, although traditionally numbered as Letter 7 in the correspondence) was written while Heloise was abbess of the Paraclete (as also Letter 9, no V below, which was written as a sermon on learning for Heloise's nuns). Radice offers only an abbreviated version of this letter in her translation of the letters of Abelard and Heloise.

In 1129 Abbot Suger of St Denis, Paris, laid claim to the abbey of Argenteuil where Heloise was prioress, and ejected the nuns. Abelard gave shelter to Heloise and some of her nuns at the Paraclete, an oratory or house of prayer, which he had founded near Troyes. Heloise's letters to Abelard witness not only to her scholarship but to her strength of character in managing this disruption in the life of the community: they also make it plain that in the nine or so years between her entry to the religious life and her opening letter to Abelard, she had been racked by thwarted desire and by memories of her lost love and so by the feeling of hypocrisy in her position.