Heloise & Abelard
Medieval Women’s Choir member Joyce Brewster discusses the text for Heloise & Abelard with scriptwriter Judith Suther. Highlighted links provide more information about particular points.
JB: Tell me how you developed the script.
JS: The script re-imagines the early 12th century through music, poetry, and readings from letters and a composite daybook. My aim has been to create text to serve the music. The script is not a play that could be performed on its own; rather, it’s a scaffolding or framework that allows the musical pieces to tell a story—though, of course, not the whole story.
JB: Do we even know much about Heloise and Abelard’s early lives?
JS: About Abelard’s we do, because he was born, in 1079, to a prominent family [A], about which records were kept. This was in Le Pallet, a tiny village in Brittany, which was not part of the France of his time. To Parisians it would have been the Wild West, an uncultivated nowhere. He left Le Pallet while still young, between age 16 and 18, and began bumming around, as a sort of freelance philosopher, setting himself up on the fringes of a center of learning, then conducting himself with such arrogance and pomposity [B] that he would be kicked out.
We know less about Heloise. If she had a surname, we don’t know it; we have no record of her father; we know only her mother’s given name, Hersindis. She was born sometime between 1096 and 1102, which makes her an almost exact contemporary of Hildegard of Bingen. She was probably illegitimate, possibly the daughter of an unprofessed resident [C] at the Benedictine convent in Argenteuil, about 20 kilometers north of Paris. This was in the Ile de France, the geographical area around present-day Paris, which formed the core of France in the 12thcentury. Our first trace of her in any records is as a “dependent child” in residence at the convent. She was educated at the convent school, where she was the brightest pupil; the level and quality of her schooling, unusual for a girl of her time, do suggest that her parents were at least moderately privileged.
JB: Where and how did Heloise and Abelard meet?
JS: By his early- to mid-twenties, Abelard had made his way to Paris. The competitive atmosphere he found there among “masters” in the cathedral schools suited him perfectly. He did not wait to earn the status of master himself, entitled to his own school. Instead, he set himself up as an authority on everything, lecturing spontaneously to large crowds of students who gathered around him to debate the important philosophical and theological questions of the day. He quickly became famous, as he was very smart, very articulate and linguistically inventive. Of course students loved him: here was a bright, odd guy who had appeared from nowhere, was full of ideas, and loved to challenge authority figures. He lived the life of a peripatetic philosopher for probably fifteen years before he met Heloise.
About 1116 Heloise came to Paris to further her studies, as the ward of her uncle Fulbert, a high-ranking cleric in the cathedral schools. Abelard’s penchant for debate had first attracted Heloise’s attention when she was still living in Argenteuil. An avid student of philosophy—a field not yet distinct from theology in Heloise’s time—she was naturally curious to hear the lectures of this iconclastic master, who was drawing bright young scholars from all over Europe and had earned the nickname “the untamed rhinoceros.”
Whether Abelard maneuvered himself into the position of Heloise’s resident tutor, as he claims, or was approached by her uncle on the older man’s initiative, perhaps at Heloise’s request, by around 1116 Abelard was boarding in Canon Fulbert’s house on the Ile de la Cité in exchange for furthering Heloise’s education.
JB: And then, l’amour fou?
JS: Yes, the illicit love affair [D] seems to have begun almost immediately. Even during the heat of this early love, Heloise and Abelard exchanged letters (in Latin, of course), as often as once a day or several times a week: although Abelard was lodging with Fulbert and his niece, he continued to move around, seeking out philosophical debates. (Parenthetically, these are the so-called “lost love letters,” [E] first copied in the 15th century, unearthed in 1974, and brought to wider scholarly attention in 1999.)
Canon Fulbert noticed nothing untoward about the relationship between his niece and her tutor for 12 to 18 months (in his defense, he may have been partially deaf), but he did notice the pregnancy that resulted. And then events played themselves out: the birth of the couple’s child in Brittany, a son they named Astrolabe, [F]; their decision to “abandon” their child [G]; a secret marriage upon their return to Paris; Abelard’s castration [H] at the hands of Fulbert; and their “withdrawal” into religious life. [I]
JB: Is this the period your text focuses on?
JS: In greater or lesser detail, almost everyone who recognizes the names Heloise and Abelard knows the bare bones of the love story, especially its aftermath. The first part of the program, before intermission, does give a taste of that story. But then we move on, as did they; there is so much more to their story. Both lived into their sixties—long lives by 12th-century standards—and few know much about their accomplishments, let alone the pain, suffering, and joy that each experienced in later life. In broad outline it is possible to trace what they did, even sketch out their achievements. This is the challenge that has inspired our program: to push the boundaries of the familiar. Our approach has been to explore what has received the least attention in the past: Heloise’s side of the story, especially in her mature years.
JB: What did happen after they first separated?
JS: The chronology will never be certain. At Abelard’s insistence, Heloise returned to the Benedictine house at Argenteuil where she had grown up, and entered the order. Abelard took refuge first at the abbey of St. Denis, also just north of Paris, then resumed the contentious moving about [J] that marked his life from the time he left home as a young man to pursue his studies.
There is no record of any contact between them for ten years, from 1119 until 1129. During this time Heloise remained at Argenteuil, where she was elected prioress, the second-highest rank in the community.
But in 1129, one of the few certain dates in their story, an outside event intervened, and Abelard’s path and Heloise’s merged again—this time for good. In that year Abbot Suger of St. Denis fabricated a document giving his abbey possession of the land on which Heloise’s convent stood. Suger’s maneuver turned Heloise and her sisters out, without warning or provision for housing them. Abelard offered the Paraclete [the Comforter] as a refuge, a piece of land given to him by a supporter on which he and a group of students had built primitive huts and a chapel, now derelict. Heloise and those of her Benedictine sisters who wished to follow her accepted his offer. From that unpromising start began Heloise’s phenomenal rise as an abbess [K] with jurisdiction over a network of Benedictine houses and forty times the amount of property she had managed at Argenteuil. At her insistence Abelard assumed the role of spiritual adviser [L] to the Paraclete—not in residence, but by means of long, detailed letters exchanged with Heloise [M]. (Parenthetically, this is the group of letters by which Heloise and Abelard have been known since the 13th century. Although only eight survive, internal references and other sources suggest there were many more.)
After Abelard and Heloise had resumed contact, first through letters and then through his visits to the Paraclete, he wrote a series of six narrative poems in a form known as planctus or laments, based on Biblical stories of suffering and loss. They were unlike anything else he wrote. Although references exist to musical settings by Abelard for all six planctus, notation survives for only one: the Planctus David, the lament of David for Saul and Jonathan. We present this song in our program, as well as a setting by Margriet Tindemans of the Planctus Dinah, the lament of Dinah for her slain lover Sichem. Also included in our program is one of the few authenticated examples of Heloise’s writing other than her letters to Abelard: a haunting elegy in verse, Flet Pastore, which Margriet has also set to music.
Rather than portraying Heloise and Abelard as the ill-fated lovers of Romantic tradition, sentenced to a grim existence after their moment of amour fou, we have given them the coloration of their times—neither black and white nor rose-tinted. Abelard was a difficult man who tried the patience of everyone who knew him; Heloise was probably a difficult woman, if only because she was too probing, too capable, and too bold for her time. Our program offers glimpses of them together and then a fadeout on her as she enters the last third of her life, the day Abelard is buried at the Paraclete—April 21. 1143.
JB: Thank you.
Judith Suther is Professor Emerita of French & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. She has translated numerous plays from the French, has written biographies of Raissa Maritain and Kay Sage, and consulted on the 2003 Seattle Repertory Theatre production of “Art” by Yasmina Reza. She is a Medieval Women's Choir member.
Joyce Brewster is retired from her position as writer for the Office of University Relations and the President’s Office, University of Washington.
© 2008 Judith Suther
Interview notes
[A] Abelard was born to Bérangar, from Poitiers, a capitaine d’armes or knight in the service of a regional landowner, and to Lucie, from the Loire valley near the city of Nantes. Both his parents were literate. Petrus was the oldest of five children. Had he stayed in Brittany, he would have inherited the knighthood; instead he ceded this birthright to one of his younger brothers.
Petrus invented the last name “Abelard” as a sort of “stage name.” The suffix “ard” is not attractive to the French ear: the French change any “eur” suffix to an “ard” to indicate “bad” (for example, “chauffeur” to “chauffard” means a “crazy driver”). return
[B] By all accounts, including his own, Abelard was a brilliant logician and debater. He subjected every settled assumption to the rigors of inquiry, citing scriptural and patristic authority on both sides of a question. His life as a scholar is marked by disputes with establishment figures, including the charismatic reformist abbot Bernard of Clairvaux. Abelard approached Bernard as he did every other opponent in the great 12th-century disputes over orthodoxy: as an intellectual “enemy” to be humiliated by the force of Abelard’s arguments. (Abelard always referred to people who disagreed with him as his “enemies.”) Not surprisingly, Bernard did become Abelard’s enemy, leading the campaign that eventually resulted in his condemnation for heresy by Pope Innocent II in 1140. return
[C] Generally speaking, in the Middle Ages no hard-and-fast boundaries separated active monastic communities from secular society. An unmarried woman or a widow with the means to pay for her keep could take refuge as an “unprofessed resident” in a convent, without taking vows as professed members of the religious communities they lived in; some had young children.
While each story varies in detail, many medieval families relied on Church-affiliated social services at every stage in their lives. When he was a young man, before he and Heloise met, Abelard’s parents both took the common path of retiring to monastic houses after their children were grown. There is no record of Bérangar and Lucie’s particular motivations for doing this, but their choice was not unusual. Perhaps they wanted to live their last years in relative peace and quiet; perhaps they wanted to avoid burdening their adult children with caring for them if they became ill; perhaps they were genuinely drawn to prayer and contemplation near the end of their lives. Or they may simply have chosen to oversee the distribution of their assets while they were both still living. In a society in which wills were not legally binding documents and therefore were often contested, many landholders opted for pre-mortem divestiture of property. return
[D] The affair was illicit because of Abelard’s status as a celibate cleric, which gave him the right to earn a living by teaching in the cathedral schools. Their subsequent marriage was kept secret in order to safeguard Abelard’s livelihood. return
[E] For centuries Heloise and Abelard were known only by the eight surviving letters they exchanged later in their lives, between 1130 and Abelard’s death in 1142. These letters, begun by Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum, inspired multitudes of literary and artistic tributes to the doomed lovers (as they are inevitably portrayed). The first and still most influential in sheer myth-making power is an episode in the Le Roman de la rose, by the 13th-century French chronicler Jean de Meung. By including in his epic saga of courtly love a single flamboyant statement by Heloise, to the effect that she would rather be Abelard’s whore than empress of the Roman Empire, Jean ensured their survival in the popular imagination. (The author of Le Roman de la rose is also the first translator into a modern European language [French] of the letters he drew on for his portrait.)
For 750 years after Jean de Meung’s exposé no further word from Heloise and Abelard themselves came to light. Then, in 1999, the medieval historian Constant J. Mews published The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, a collection of 113 letters the two exchanged from around 1116 to 1119, in the heat of their affair. Mews’s book relies on a 1974 edition of the letters by Ewald Könsgen, a doctoral student in medieval philology. Könsgen, in turn had based his work on a 15th-century manuscript copied by a Cistercian monk, Johannes de Vepria, from an early 12th-century source, now lost. De Vepria does not identify the letter writers, whom he designates only as V (for Vir, Latin for Man) and M (for Mulier, Woman). Könsgen suggests they may be Abelard and Heloise, but does not establish their identity. In a carefully reasoned textual and historical analysis of the letters, Mews takes that step. His thesis ignited a firestorm of controversy among scholars, but is now widely accepted.
To the modern eye the contrast in tone between the earlier and later letters can be startling. The manuscript excerpts copied by De Vepria—the “lost love letters”—are rife with the sensuous imagery of the Song of Songs. Heloise is “sweeter than honey in the honeycomb”; she is Abelard’s “lily that does not wither and whose fragrance does not fade.” Abelard is “the ivory column” on which Heloise’s “whole being rests”; he is her “soul’s desire, more sweetly scented than any spice.” These are the lovers who risked everything for the hot delirium of each other’s arms and expressed their erotic desires freely.
The later letters, on the other hand, reveal a passion not so much spent as banked like coals that radiate heat after the flames have subsided. Heloise still seeks a lover’s responses from Abelard but tones down her entreaties when he cannot or will not answer as she wishes. He will sustain the bond with her only through general answers to her appeals and a spiritual father’s devotion to all members of the Paraclete community; very well, she will take what she can get. return
[F] An apt comparison might be parents’ today naming their child “Microchip”: an astrolabe, as Heloise and Abelard’s Parisian intellectual peers would have known, was a small three dimensional model of the universe. He was given no Biblical name; what pious rural Bretons made of the ungodly name Astrolabe is not recorded. return
[G] Until the middle of the 19th century in France, the custom of “farming out” a child to family members or paid caretakers was more the rule than the exception—especially among town and city dwellers, who had no need of the child’s labor and often found it onerous to feed the extra mouth. Few reliable figures exist on the practice of turning babies over to wet nurses; however, as late as 1815, a national census reports that 75% of rural households included at least one “nourrisson externe” (nursing baby not related to the family.)
If opinion polls had existed in Heloise and Abelard’s time, the couple’s decision to leave baby Astrolabe with his aunts and uncles and cousins would almost certainly have been approved by a substantial margin. Not only was the custom widespread and taken for granted; in this case, the child would be with relatives, well cared for, and his parents could be involved at least in limited ways with his upbringing. (Naming the child “Astrolabe” was far more daring than leaving him with Abelard’s family.) return
[H] Canon Fulbert was not appeased by Heloise and Abelard’s secret marriage: the private arrangement failed to restore his honor as Heloise’s protector. He had Abelard castrated. Although his punishment of Abelard was daring even in an age of sporadic lawlessness, personal revenge was still widely practiced—especially in cases of unsanctioned violence, real or perceived, such as rape or sexual relations with a minor. A 13th-century law book in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, illustrating crimes that merit severe punishment, shows the castration of a knight by four men also dressed as knights: one holds the offending knight down, another administers the knife, and two stand armed guard. While the illustration does not suggest that castration was a routine punishment for knights (men of Abelard’s standing), it does indicate that the practice was not considered barbaric or unjustified to the degree it would be today.return
[I] After their affair Heloise and Abelard joined separate monastic houses; neither “withdrew” into cloistered or even contemplative orders. Although she could have done so, Heloise did not join one of the numerous “strict observance” groups such as the Beguines, who lived in self-sustaining communities throughout Belgium, Holland, and northern France. Nor did Abelard become a hermit in the well-established tradition of the desert fathers. Both settled in orders that maintained porous walls with the secular world. return
[J] One of Abelard’s supporters who provided him a place to live and study was Thibault of Champagne. A major landholder in the region southeast of Paris, Thibault gave Abelard several acres along a tributary of the Seine called the Ardusson, not far from the present-day city of Nogent-sur-Seine. The land was fertile but mostly undeveloped because it was low-lying and swampy; Abelard and a group of his students built primitive huts and an oratory or chapel, along the river. He first called his hermitage the Trinity but soon changed the name to the Paraclete or the Comforter. At least for a while he seems to have found real comfort in having his own place of retreat.
Yet as always happened with Abelard, conflict and controversy sought him out—or he attracted them. Challenged (Abelard says “attacked”) by his rival philosophers from the moment he began teaching at the Paraclete, he abandoned his hermitage after a fairly short residence. His next, and most disastrous, venture took him back to Brittany, where he became abbot of an outlying abbey more Celtic than Benedictine in its culture and habits. (In fact, St. Gildas-de-Rhuys, on a rock promontory jutting into the Atlantic, had been founded in 536 by a renegade Welsh monk and had not come under Benedictine discipline, such as it was, until 818.) There were at least two, possibly three, intermediate stays elsewhere that have never been documented. return
[K] Compared to assembling Abelard’s resumé, the task of piecing together Heloise’s life and accomplishments presents far greater obstacles. He wrote books; he taught in prominent schools; he led the public life available to men of his birth, intellectual gifts, and temperament. The life of a woman of equal gifts was governed by the convention of anonymity, which not only effaced medieval women’s names and their work; it also influenced how they saw themselves. Perhaps inevitably, Heloise did not consider herself a writer. Other than documents addressed to her abbey’s various constituencies, few authenticated examples of her writing survive. Heloise’s prose style was distinctive enough, however, to earn praise from her fellow abbots Peter of Cluny and Bernard of Clairvaux. All three belonged to a literate elite that put a high premium on inventive fluency in Latin. Although it seems unlikely that Peter and Bernard’s opinions would be based on Heloise’s business correspondence, which is the major source of surviving evidence.
Efforts at reconstructing Heloise are further complicated by the cardinal rule of self-presentation in her time: when addressing a “superior” in rank or status, one assumes the role of humble supplicant. Thoroughly schooled as she was, Heloise played this role to perfection. Although endowed with obvious talents for leadership and diplomacy, she insisted she had no such gifts. Her long and successful stewardship of the Paraclete, however, suggests otherwise. Over the thirty years or so of her abbacy, from around 1130 to her death in 1162 or 1163, the simple stone chapel and primitive shelters she took over from Abelard grew into seven affiliated foundations in Champagne and neighboring counties. This made the abbey the largest single landholder (and therefore employer) in the region—and Heloise the head of a small fiefdom. Although she claimed to need guidance from Abelard on how to carry out her duties, the impressive expansion she presided over occurred during the twenty years she survived him.
The most intractable obstacle to reconstructing “the later Heloise” is the absence of the records that were almost certainly kept by the bursar, cellarer, novice mistress, and other officers at the Paraclete itself. Typically, significant transactions with the outside world would have been recorded, such as the sale or barter of goods or services; the transfer of property titles; the granting of rights cultivate portions of the convent’s land; the admission of residents (with or without dowries, which if present would be itemized); and, of course, operating expenses and income from assets such as grazing lands or schools. Such records would provide a nuanced picture of Heloise as abbess of an extensive residential network serving women of all ages. Without the records, much is left to the educated imagination.
Reasonable inferences can be made from other, related records that have been preserved. Like its much grander sister house, the royal abbey at Fontevrault, where Eleanor of Aquitaine spent her last years, the Paraclete was home to young girls and elderly widows as well as women in their prime years. As convents across Europe typically did, Heloise’s community provided an honorable alternative to marriage. Some women entered for the chance to lead scholarly lives; others came from families seeking the advantages of affiliation with a respected religious foundation; still other women brought family property in exchange for care later in life. The Paraclete therefore functioned in party as school, library, research center, church, retirement home, and hospice, serving a broad “clientele”—much as such institutions do today. Judging by the steady growth of her community’s assets, Heloise earned a reputation for fairness and shrewd business dealings with regional landowners. Had it been otherwise, they would hardly have signed over their property or their daughter to her.
Two of Abelard’s nieces were themselves “given” to the Church under the protection of a relative. When they were around ten and twelve years old, Agathe and Agnes traveled from Brittany to be educated under Heloise’s direction at the Paraclete. Eventually, both girls became professed members of the community. Having spent their early years in the same extended household as Heloise and Abelard’s son, the girls also brought their Aunt Heloise a vital link with him. return
[L] In the last decade or so of his life, Abelard wrote dozens of documents for the use of Heloise and her community of nuns at the Paraclete. All the work came at Heloise’s request: new prayers for the night offices, a version of the “Our Father” (the Lord’s Prayer) that Abelard considered more authentic than the one in common use, hymns for the entire liturgical year, detailed advice on practical as well as spiritual matters, scriptural explications de texte, and a revision of the Rule of Benedict especially for women. Few of these documents survive today. Nonetheless, Abelard’s ability to produce such a concentrated body of work is remarkable at a time when his health was failing, he was as usual moving frequently, and was under constant threat of heresy charges. (He was convicted in 1140, two years before his death.) return
[M] Exactly when or how communication resumed between Heloise and Abelard is not known. By 1129 or 1130, Heloise had received a copy of Abelard’s now famous Historia calamitatum (The Story of My Misfortunes), a long letter purportedly written to a fellow monk to console him. In order to put his friend’s troubles in perspective, Abelard recounts the woes of his affair with Heloise. Although the letter was not addressed to her, she answered him at length, vigorously refuting his portrayal of their union as a lustful interlude on his part and her as the passive object of his desire. Her answer is now commonly designated as Letter 2 and Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum as Letter 1 in the set of eight surviving letters they exchanged between 1130 and Abelard’s death in 1142.
Letter 2 from Heloise opens a window onto her thoughts and feelings about the turn her fortunes had taken. She is not reconciled to the religious life; she still looks back with erotic pleasure and defiance on her brief idyll with Abelard. If she cannot have him in the flesh, then she wants a passionate intellectual union of equals.
From Abelard comes a very different style of expression, far less personal. His detailed enumeration of their “sins” in the Historia Calamitatum seems to have purged him of all interest in carnal love and passionate friendship; now he counsels Heloise to direct her energies to loving Christ. (The fact that Abelard had been castrated may not in itself explain his insistent formality with his former lover. Historians agree that in Abelard’s case it is likely that only the testicles were removed; contrary to popular belief even today, adult males who are castrated—as a treatment for testicular cancer, for example—can retain sexual function.) Despite intense and repeated urging from Heloise, he closes off discussion of their former erotic life together. return