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Extract from introduction to Heloise and Abelard by James Burge (Profile, November 2003) Abelard and Heloise lived
900 years ago. Their story is probably the most memorable one of the
Middle Ages: the secret affair of a brilliant philosopher with his pupil;
the birth of their child Astralabe; their secret marriage followed by
Abelard’s brutal castration at the hands of Heloise’s uncle; the
couple’s retreat into monasticism. It is also the one in which we are
given an unrivalled insight into the thoughts and feelings of the
protagonists. We know about these events
because of two discoveries of collections of letters. The first took place
less than a hundred years after their deaths; the second had to wait until
the last three years to be recognised for what it was. The first find was
a collection of eight letters in Latin, five from Abelard and three from
Heloise. They were first published in the thirteenth century. Other
sources do corroborate the story, but without these letters nobody today
would be aware of the love affair. Abelard would still be remembered, but
as a controversial philosopher of the middle ages whose career had
culminated in a disastrous clash with ecclesiastical authority. Heloise
would be little more than a name on an obscure twelfth-century manuscript.
It is a tribute to her qualities, not least as a writer, that her three
letters alone were enough to have made her famous. These letters captivate
anyone who comes in contact with them. Not only do they contain the story
but they are a unique resource for anyone interested in the inner world of
people from an age which is both so different from and yet so similar to
our own. It would almost have
been ungrateful to have asked providence for anything more. Yet there was
more. In 1980 a young scholar in
New Zealand called Constant Mews was looking at a modern edition of a
rather obscure Latin book from the fifteenth century. It was a collection
of examples of how to write letters: correct forms of address, good style,
etc. The work included a number of worthy but staid examples but the
author had finished with something a little different: a section which he
headed ‘From the Letters of Two Lovers’. This was less formal and much
more passionate. It was a collection of fragments from 113 letters. The
correspondents were not named; they were simply labelled ‘Man’ and
‘Woman’. Mews read: ‘To her sweet
love, more sweetly scented than any spice, from she who is his in heart
and body: I send the freshness of eternal happiness as the flowers of your
youth fade’. He knew the story of Abelard and Heloise well. As he
read the book he realised that it was possible that these letters
constituted the most extraordinary time capsule. Both Abelard and Heloise
mention that during the period of their affair (no more than two years)
they wrote to each other every day. Could he now be looking at copies of
these daily messages? He read, ‘How fertile with delight is your breast,
how you shine with utter beauty, body so full of moisture, that
indescribable scent of yours’. It was not impossible. Mews was fascinated by the
possibility; he continued to study the letters he had come across for the
next decade. If he was right it was the kind of discovery about which
historians do not even dare to let themselves fantasise. It was almost of
the order of a new play by Shakespeare or a lost gospel. Or was it a
blatant forgery that could only bring ruin to an academic? This could not
be a modern forgery, however. The letters were obviously from an old
source, on paper of the right period.
Could the letters on the other hand have been forged in the years
that followed the couple’s death? It seemed very unlikely: the
collection was such a mess. Parts of it did not make sense; events and
arguments did not always hang together. Someone at the time might well
have decided to write letters from the standpoint of somebody else (to
call such an act forgery would be the modern way of judging what was a not
unknown medieval practice) but if they had the collection would have been
more coherent. It would have been put together in a way that made an
obvious moral point. There was no moral in the new letters. Could they be genuine
letters but written by a different couple? Mews checked through facts he
could glean from the collection he had discovered against what is known of
Abelard and Heloise from the well-established letters. The man in the new
letters is certainly a philosopher by training – he uses all the
language of medieval philosophy, even terms that were particularly dear to
Abelard in his scholarly writings. He is also, like Abelard, famous –
the woman thinks he is the most brilliant man of his time – and no
stranger to controversy. The woman is his student, just like Heloise. But
she is not just a student, she is his most able pupil, a woman of
outstanding intelligence, well versed in classical literature. These are
the very things for which we are told Heloise was famous in her lifetime.
The woman makes it clear that, although she is French, the man is not –
Abelard was a Breton. The couple are conducting the relationship in
secret, living in constant fear of discovery, just like Abelard and
Heloise. The couple in the new letters are plainly almost painfully in
love and fired up with a vertiginous erotic energy, just as Abelard
describes his own relationship in his autobiography and Heloise confirms
in her later letters. If these letters were written by a couple other than
Abelard and Heloise one would be left with the most amazing string of
coincidences to explain. Even beyond the facts of
the case as Mews continued to read and to study the new letters he got a
feeling which was to be shared by others who read them. Scholars who know
medieval Latin as well as they know their mother tongue agree that the
style is unmistakably that of the couple. Particularly in the case of
Heloise it is almost like recognising the voice of someone you know. As
one scholar has remarked, ‘this is Heloise writing’. Today
there is a substantial body of scholars (complete agreement never happens)
who believe that the new letters probably have their origins with Abelard
and Heloise. This is, of
course, just the beginning of the story for academics – there are
endless lacunae to be puzzled over and references to be untangled. What we
have for certain in the newly-discovered letters, however, is a glimpse in
detail – sometimes poignant and sometimes even funny – into one of the
most famous affairs in history. The letters (preserved
originally by Heloise, presumably, later to be deposited in the library of
her convent) give a snapshot of a clandestine affair. Exchanged apparently
every day, they read almost like the mobile phone text messages of a
teenage romance. We see a
sequence of extravagant declarations, occasional tiffs, arguments and
disagreements about the nature of love. We
find Abelard, for example, desperate for a letter from her – ‘Write
anything, even a couple of words if you can’, he begs.
We find Heloise promising, ‘the quicker you come to me,
the quicker you will find cause for joy’. But she also urges caution –
‘Thoughtful delay is better than imprudent haste’. The stress of
maintaining a secret relationship eventually begins to manifest itself in
bickering until we find Heloise complaining – ‘Now I am tired I cannot
reply to you because you are taking sweet things as burdensome and in
doing so you sadden my spirit’. It
is tempting to speculate that the ‘sweet things’ which she mentions
might be her pregnancy, about which Abelard might have had mixed feelings.
For whatever reason, the sequence of newly discovered letters stops at
this point. The story is continued in
the well-established collection of letters which has been known since the
Middle Ages. They were exchanged twelve years after the affair. The first
one is from Abelard; it is a lengthy narrative which is in effect his
autobiography. In it he tells of the birth of their son, their secret
marriage, how his castration was ordered by Heloise’s enraged uncle and
of the couple’s separation and retreat into monastic houses. He gives
also an account of his further philosophical career and of one of his two
trials for heresy. Heloise’s reaction to his
version of events is startling. Her style of writing has developed from
that of the flowery love note into that of the considered thesis but her
subject matter is still sexual bliss and love. Abelard has made the
mistake of saying in his autobiography that she is now a devout nun.
Heloise’s beautifully thought out and elegantly argued reply puts him
straight. However she may appear to the outside world, she tells him, she
does not have the total commitment of a good nun. She describes to him the
true nature of her thoughts in one of the best accounts of erotic love
that can be found anywhere in western literature, let alone from the quill
of a medieval nun: ‘Even during the celebration of the mass lewd visions
take a hold upon my unhappy soul …. Even in sleep I know no respite.
Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body … I should
be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I
have lost’. But Heloise was not content
merely to bemoan her fate. From the moment of this confession she was to
direct her energies, in letters and in actions, towards trying to
reconcile the opposing elements of her life: the sexual bliss she refused
to repudiate, the loving friendship she had discovered with Abelard and
the spiritual joy towards which she was directed by her studies.
Heloise’s struggle to find peace and understanding provides the
counterpoint to Abelard’s story of philosophical conflict. It is because
of her that the story of the lovers continues to fascinate and touch us
way beyond the violent end of their affair. Heloise now appears to us
– thanks to the new letters and to new scholarship – as much more than
a tragic icon of unwavering love. Her influence on Abelard can be seen in
philosophical work they did together right up to the end of his life. We
know how hard she worked at it but we can still only guess whether she
herself considered that she had achieved the goal she had set for herself:
in some way to reconstruct the love which she had shared with her wild and
brilliant philosopher. Heloise and Abelard: a
twelfth-century love story, by James Burge, is published by Profile
Books on November 6th |