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A Brief Introduction....

 “My heart was not with me, but with you. But now, more than ever, is it is not with you, it is nowhere, since it cannot exist without you.”                                                                                                                                                                               -These words were written by Heloise to her lover, Abelard, after nearly a decade apart.   

With this opening quote and line, one may anticipate this analysis of the two famous historical lovers to be viewed through a romantic lens, but to present the love story of Peter Abelard and his tutee, Heloise, in such a light, to focus merely on the highs of their impassioned love affair, would be a historical disservice because though these two are famous for their forbidden love, towards the end of Abelard an Heloise’s life, their romantic fire had cooled to a depressingly unremarkable ember (see fig 1). Thus, the lives of Abelard and Heloise have been subject to exaggeration, their love to fantasy and wishful thinking, and their letters to hyperbole.           

 Here is their story….

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(Fig. 1: Edmund Blair Leighton - Abelard and his Pupil Heloise, 1882)

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Let us begin with their love story….

To understand a story fully, one must start at the beginning. It was the year 1114 A.D. when thirty-four-year-old logician, orator, and teacher, Pierre Abelard (commonly referred to as Peter) entered the household of a Canon Fulbert and first laid eyes on his eighteen-year-old niece, Heloise (see fig. 2). From here, many who have heard the tale of Abelard and Heloise see Abelard as a love-drunk romantic who only desires to be with the new prey of his infatuation and these same people may perceive that Heloise was, as Medieval scholar, Bruce Fink wrote, “a beautiful and well-educated student whose honor was being jealously guarded by a brutish uncle” (47). But this is not necessarily the case. In fact, historian, Lyndon Orr, notes in his essay on Abelard and Heloise that Abelard offered his talents as a renowned teacher and intellectual to be Heloise’s personal tutor. Pierre Abelard was a teacher who drew thousands of enthusiastic students. He was a marvelous logician and an accomplished orator. He was at least partially responsible for the founding of the University of Paris, which in turn became the mother of medieval and modern universities. So when he approached Fulbert and offered his intellectual skills as a tutor to his young niece,“[s]uch an offer coming from so brilliant a man was joyfully accepted” (Orr np). Essentially, Abelard manipulated his way into the household of Canon Fulbert which gave him full, unchaperoned access to the young girl. With him now being granted access to Heloise, it did not take long before he and she became lovers. Abelard forfeited his honor as a gentleman by taking the “innocence” and potentional for a good marriage from Heloise and dishonoring Fulbert by making his home into an unmerited honeymoon.

Fulbert allowed this with the naïve confidence that Abelard would respect his house, his niece, and his family name. So while some have, through the years, seen Fulbert as a “brutish uncle,” the fact of the matter is that in medieval society, remaining a virgin until marriage was not only expected of a middle to upper class young women, it was necessary in acquiring a decent marriage and keeping the family name from disgrace. So while it is true that Fulbert was trying to keep Heloise from engaging in premarital sex with Abelard so as not to tarnish the family’s name, he, as her protector, was most likely trying to save Heloise from the personal ridicule and slim marital prospects that result in promiscuity. This is not the narrative which has been pushed through the years; one where Abelard manipulated his way into the home and life of Heloise and where the uncle is not a mean, anti-romance old man determined to keep the lovers apart, but rather, a protective father figure who strove to keep his nieces’ honor intact.

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   (Fig 2: Heloise and Abelard on a terrace attributed to Charles Lock Eastlake)

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Astrolabe ….

Soon after their physical relationship began, Fulbert found out about it and kicked Abelard out (see fig 3). But it was too late for Heloise was pregnant. She ran away from home to the sister of Abelard’s house and gave birth to a son whom she and Abelard named Astrolabe. Unpon finding out about the child, Fulbert was furious, and rightly so. His hospitality had been outraged and his niece dishonored. He insisted that the pair should at once be married. Here was revealed a certain weakness in the character of Abelard and some of the inconsistencies in the story. He consented to the marriage, but insisted that it should be kept an utter secret.

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(Fig. 3: Canon Furbert witnessing the affair of Abelard and Heloise).

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Misfortunes in Marriage….

Oddly enough, it was Heloise herself who objected to becoming the wife of the man she loved. She saw that, were he to marry her, his advancement in the Church would be almost impossible; for, while some minor clergy sometimes married, matrimony at the time was becoming a fatal bar to ecclesiastical promotion. And so Heloise pleaded to both her uncle and Abelard, that there should be no marriage. She would rather bear all manner of disgrace than stand in the way of Abelard’s advancement.

“I loathe the thought of a marriage which would humiliate you.”

She wrote to Abelard. Nevertheless, the two were married. For months they met but it was seldom. Meanwhile, however, the taunts and innuendos directed against Heloise so irritated Fulbert that he broke his promise of secrecy, and told his friends that Abelard and Heloise were man and wife. They went to Heloise for confirmation and she lied and told them it was a fake marriage. She even took an oath upon the Scriptures that there had been no marriage. Fulbert was enraged by this. He ill-treated Heloise, and he forbade Abelard to visit her. Fulbert thought Abelard would marry another woman so he did something ghastly. He sent four men to attack Abelard. Three of them bound him, while the fourth, with a razor, castrated him. “Violently incensed, they laid a plot against me, and one night while I all unsuspecting was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they broke in with the help of one of my servants whom they had bribed. There they had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful punishment […]; for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow,” Abelard later wrote in his work, Historia Calamitatum. The story of my Misfortunes (see fig. 4).

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(Fig. 4: Rendering of Abelard getting attacked in the night by Fulbert’s men).

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After that Misfortunate Night....

Even after his horrific assault, Heloise was still devoted to him. But Abelard now showed a selfishness–and indeed, a “meanness,” as Orr says, far beyond any that he had before exhibited. He made it plain that he put no trust in his wife’s fidelity. He was unwilling that she should live in the world and take pleasure in it while he could not; and so he told her that she must become a nun. Essentially, Abelard believed that if he had to be forced into celibacy, so would Heloise.  She knelt before the altar and dawned the veil of a nun. Abelard himself put on the black tunic of a Benedictine monk and entered the Abbey of St. Denis (see fig. 5). All his later life was one of misfortune, of humiliation, and even of personal danger. He eventually left to seek out solitude, he built a hut for himself out of reeds and rushes, hoping to spend his final years in meditation. But there were many who had not forgotten his ability as a teacher. These flocked by hundreds to see him and hear his wisdom. All this time, no word had passed between him and Heloise, which had been about ten years. But when Abelard wrote a book, which he called The Story of My Misfortunes, a copy of it reached the hands of Heloise, and she at once sent to Abelard the first of a series of letters which have remained unique in the literature of love.

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                                           ( Fig 5: Abbey of St. Denis)

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The Letters….

A scholar on the lives of Abelard and Heloise, C. J. Mews, wrote “there is a mythic quality to the lives of Peter Abelard and Heloise that has never ceased to fascinate readers of their letters” (7). This is true, one can hardly mention the lives of Abelard and Heloise without noting the letters the two sent to one another over the course of their lives. But this may be the most overly-romanized piece of their story. Let us compare an interaction between the two and the tone in which each of them writes. The excerpt from this first letter is from Heloise.

“At thy command I would change, not merely my costume, but my very soul, so entirely art thou the sole possessor of my body and my spirit!”

Here, Heloise is denying herself, her comfort, her spirituality (which is of vital importance to peoples of the medieval era), and giving her entire being to Abelard. One can read the inner turmoil in her words and can nearly hear the anguish in her pining. It is no surprise that her letters have transcended the centuries, but how did Abelard respond to his wife? Here is his response:

“To Heloise, his sister in Christ, from Abelard, her brother in Him.”

The difference is stark; where Heloise is aching for her lover, “the sole possessor of [her] body and [her] spirit,” Abelard refers to her as his “sister” and he her “brother.” What a slicing way to answer a letter from his wife; almost as sharp as the blade which cut him (see fig. 6).

(Fig. 6: Héloïse imagined in a mid-19th-century engraving). 

The letters Abelard wrote back were long, but throughout the whole of them his tone was cold and prudent. He wrote to her again and again, always in the same remote and unimpassioned way. He tells her about the history of monasticism, and discusses with her matters of theology and ethics, but he never writes one word to feed the flame of romance. It is a curious thing that so many romantics have turned to the letters between Abelard and Heloise as joyous, muse-worthy utterances of true love, when in actuality, they were a one-sided and unrequited declaration of love from a wife to her broken, evasive husband. 

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Together Again in Death….

An interesting notion to consider when trying to piece together this ancient story and, harder still, trying to understand the individuals involved, is not what they did but what they failed to do. When faced with the decision to marry Heloise at Fulbert’s orders, he complies but only if they marriage is kept secret so he can have a better chance at rising up in the church and within society. If he had truly been caught in the maddening love which history has ensnared him in, then he would have been willing to give up his want for a higher position or social acceptance because he would have had his lover, Heloise. But he did not. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the authenticity of their love is the most unspoken and neglected outcome of their affair: Astrolabe. In all the letters they sent one another, their son was only mentioned once. Abelard scholar, Betty Radice notes this when she writes that hardly anything is known about Astrolabe, except that Abelard secured him a benefice upon Heloise's urging: “this is the only time Heloise mentions him, and nothing definite is known about the young man who had played so small a part in his parents' lives" (43). Here, Radice hits on something subtle but important: Astrolabe, their son, their only child, the product of their love, was not a large part of their lives. In fact, he was sent away. Yes, he was taken care of financially, but monetary value falls far short to material care. It is interesting to ponder that the word Astrolabe, for which their son was named, which is an astronomical device used for navigating and locating objects but by the end of their lives, this little family of three was separated. Abelard in a small shack living out his days until old age claimed him, Heloise serving under the veil of a nun, and Astrolabe off somewhere that history cannot locate, they could not find a way back to one another, a way to live together. Abelard and Heloise would not reunite, would not find each other again, until they died; Abelard on April 21, 1142, Heloise died in 1164 (22 years after) and the two were placed in a tomb in the great cemetery of Pere Lachaise (see figs. 7 and 8).

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(Figs. 7 and 8: Tomb of Abelard and Heloise, cemetery of Pere Lachaise)

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In Conclusion….

Throughout the chronicle of their love, from the early days of flirting while surrounded by academic books, to the secrecy of a concealed romance, the pregnancy, the fallout of a mutating attack in the night, to the forced celibacy, to the anticlimactic ending, one can see how the story of Peter Abelard and Heloise has been subject to embellishment and even fantasy, but despite the exaggeration, Abelard and Heloise did exist, they did (at least for a time) love one another, and they remain as a fascinating look into the times of medieval life.  

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( Fig. 9: Abelard and Heloise in the manuscript Roman de la Rose, 14th century).

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Bibliography

Abelard, Peter, and Henry Adams Bellows. Historia calamitatum. The Story of my Misfortunes.

Saint Paul, T.A. Boyd, 1922.

Abelard, Peter, and Heloise. Letters of Abelard and Heloise. CreateSpace, 2015. Wight, O.    

W., et al. Lives and letters of Abelard and Heloise. M. Doolady, 1861.  

Abelard, Peter and Jan M. Ziolkowski. Letters of Peter Abelard, beyond the Personal. Catholic  

University of America Press, 2008. Medieval Texts in Translation. EBSCOhost,  

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=500882&site=eds-live.

Classen, Albrecht. “Abelard and Heloise's Love Story from the Perspective of Their Son  

Astrolabe: Luise Rinser's Novel ‘Abelard's Love.’” Rocky Mountain Review of Language  

and Literature, vol. 57, no. 1, 2003, pp. 9–31. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1348032.

Fink, Bruce. The Purloined Love : An Inspector Canal Mystery. Karnac Books, 2014. The  

Karnac Library. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=821697&site=eds-live.

Mews, C. J. Abelard and Heloise. Oxford University Press, 2005. Great Medieval Thinkers.

EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=138178&site=eds-live.

Orr, Lyndon. Famous Affinities of History : The Romance of Devotion. New York, Walter J.  

Black, 1912.