Héloïse (; c. 1101 – 16 May 1164), variously Héloïse d'ArgenteuilCharrier, Charlotte. Heloise Dans L'histoire Et Dans la Legende. Librairie Ancienne Honore Champion Quai Malaquais, VI, Paris, 1933 or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess.
Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Praelatus Nullius. Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
She is famous in history and popular culture for her love affair and correspondence with the leading medieval logician and theologian Peter Abelard, who became her colleague, collaborator, and husband. She is known for exerting critical intellectual influence upon his work and posing many challenging questions to him such as those in the Problemata Heloissae.
Her surviving letters are considered a foundation of French and European literature and primary inspiration for the practice of courtly love. Her erudite and sometimes erotically charged correspondence is the Latin basis for the bildungsroman genre and serves alongside Abelard's Historia Calamitatum as a model of the classical epistolary genre. Her influence extends on later writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Madame de Lafayette, Thomas Aquinas, Choderlos de Laclos, Voltaire, Rousseau, Simone Weil, and Dominique Aury.
She is an important figure in the establishment of women's representation in scholarship and is known for her controversial portrayals of gender and marriage which influenced the development of modern feminism.
Philosophy and legacy
Héloïse heavily influenced Abelard's ethics, theology, and philosophy of love.Clanchy, Michael. Abelard: A Medieval Life. 1999.Mews, Constant. Abelard and Heloise (Great Medieval Thinkers). Oxford, 2005. As a scholar of Cicero following in his tradition,McGlaughlin, Mary Martin. Listening to Heloise. https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780312213541 Heloise writes of pure friendship and pure unselfish love. Her letters critically develop an ethical philosophy in which intent is centrally placed as critical for determining the moral correctness or "sin" of an action. She claims: "For it is not the deed itself but the intention of the doer that makes the sin. Equity weighs not what is done, but the spirit in which it is done."McGlaughlin, Mary and Bonnnie Wheeler. The Letters of Heloise and Abelard. This perspective influenced Abelard's intention-centered ethics described in his later work Etica (Scito Te Ipsum) (c. 1140) and thus serves as a foundation to the development of the deontological ethics of intentionalist ethics in medieval philosophy prior to Aquinas.
She describes her love as "innocent" yet paradoxically "guilty" of having caused a punishment (Abelard's castration). She refuses to repent of her so-called sins, insisting that God had punished her only after she was married and had already moved away from so-called "sin". Her writings emphasize intent as the key to identifying whether an action is sinful/wrong, while insisting that she has always had good intent.Jeske, Diana. Wholly Guilty and Wholly Innocent. https://blue-stocking.org.uk/2008/04/01/wholly-guilty-and-wholly-innocent/
Héloïse wrote critically of marriage conducted without love, comparing it to contractual prostitution, and describing it as different from "pure love" and devotional friendship such as that she shared with Peter Abelard.Newman, Barbara. Review of The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise edited by David Luscombe Oxford. In her first letter, she writes that she "preferred love to wedlock, freedom to a bond."Fordham University. "Medieval Sourcebook Heloise: Letter to Abelard." Accessed 8 October 2014. She also states, "Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection; for it is evident that she goes after his wealth and not the man, and is willing to prostitute herself, if she can, to a richer." Peter Abelard himself reproduces her arguments (citing Heloise) in Historia Calamitatum. She also writes critically of childbearing, child care, and mutually exclusive aspects of scholarship and parenthood. Heloise preferred what she perceived as the relative honesty of sex work to what she perceived as the hypocrisy of gold-digging marriage: "If the name of wife seems holier and more impressive, to my ears the name of mistress always sounded sweeter or, if you are not ashamed of it, the name of concubine or whore...God is my witness, if Augustus, who ruled over the whole earth, should have thought me worthy of the honor of marriage and made me ruler of all the world forever, it would have seemed sweeter and more honorable to me to be called your mistress than his empress" (The Latin word she chose now rendered as "whore", scortum (from "scrotum") is curiously in medieval usage a term for male prostitute or "rent boy".)Newman, Barbara. The Astonishing Heloise. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n02/barbara-newman/astonishing-heloiseAdams. University of Koeln. Words for Prostitute in Latin. http://www.rhm.uni-koeln.de/126/Adams.pdf
In her later letters, Heloise develops with her husband Abelard an approach for women's religious management and female scholarship, insisting that a convent for women be run with rules specifically interpreted for women's needs.Levitan, William. Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings.
Heloise is a significant forerunner of contemporary feminist scholars as one of the first feminine scholars, and the first medieval female scholar, to discuss marriage, child-bearing, and sex work in a critical way.Lara, Emily. Heloise: The Life of an Early Feminist. http://medium.com/@laraemily/the-life-of-an-early-feminist-df20f37f1d57Chewning, SM. Review of Bonnie Wheeler: Listening to Heloise. https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1246
Life and historical events Background and education
Héloïse is variously spelled Helöise, Héloyse, Hélose, Heloisa, Helouisa, Eloise, and Aloysia, among other variations. Her first name is derived from Proto-Germanic Hailawidis, "holy wood", or possibly a feminization of St. Eloi. Her family origin and original surname are unknown, but her last name is often rendered as "D'Argenteuil" based on her childhood home or sometimes "Du Paraclet" based on her mid-life appointment as abbess at the convent of the Paraclete near Troyes, France.
Early in life, Héloïse was recognized as a leading scholar of Latin, Greek and Hebrew hailing from the convent of Argenteuil just outside Paris, where she was educated by nuns until adolescence. She was already renowned for her knowledge of language and writing when she arrived in Paris as a young woman, and had developed a reputation for intelligence and insight. Abelard writes that she was nominatissima, "most renowned" for her gift in reading and writing. She wrote poems, plays and hymns, some of which have been lost.
Her family background is largely unknown. She was the ward of her maternal uncle (avunculus) Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame and the daughter of a woman named Hersinde, who is sometimes speculated to have been Hersint of Champagne (Lady of Montsoreau and founder of the Fontevraud Abbey) or possibly a lesser known nun called Hersinde at the convent of St. Eloi (from which the name "Heloise" would have been taken).
In her letters she implies she is of a lower social standing than Peter Abelard, who was originally from the lower nobility, though he had rejected knighthood to be a philosopher. Speculation that her mother was Hersinde of Champagne/Fontrevaud and her father Gilbert Garlande conflicts with Heloise's depiction of herself as lower class than Abelard. Hersinde of Champagne was of lower nobility, and the Garlandes were from a higher social echelon than Abelard and served as his patrons. The Hersinde of Champagne theory is further complicated by the fact that Hersinde of Champagne died in 1114 between the ages of 54 and 80, implying that she would have had to have given birth to Heloise between the ages of 35 and 50.
What is known for sure is that her Uncle Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame collected her to Notre Dame from her childhood home in Argenteuil. By her mid teens to early twenties, she was renowned throughout France for her scholarship. While her birth year is disputed, she is traditionally held to be about 15 to 17 when meeting Abelard. By the time she became his student, she was already of high repute herself. As a poetic and highly literate prodigy of female sex familiar with multiple languages, she attracted much attention, including the notice of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, who notes that he became aware of her acclaim when he and she were both young. She soon attracted the romantic interest of celebrity scholar Peter Abelard.
Heloise is said to have gained knowledge in medicine or folk medicine from either Abelard or his kinswoman Denise and gained reputation as a physician in her role as abbess of Paraclete.
Meeting Abelard
In his autobiographical piece and public letter Historia Calamitatum (c. 1132?), Abelard tells the story of his relationship with Héloïse, whom he met in 1115, when he taught in the Paris schools of Notre Dame. Abelard describes their relationship as beginning with a premeditated seduction, but Heloise contests this perspective adamantly in her replies. (It is sometimes speculated that Abelard may have presented the relationship as fully of his responsibility in order to justify his later punishment and withdrawal to religion and/or in order to spare Heloise's reputation as an abbess and woman of God.) Conversely, in her early love letters, Heloise depicts herself as the initiator, having chosen Abelard as her friend and lover among the thousands of men in Notre Dame.Mews, Constant. The Lost Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise.
In his letters, Abelard praises Heloise as extremely intelligent and just passably pretty, drawing attention to her academic status rather than framing her as a sex object: "She is not bad in the face, but her copious writings are second to none."Nielsen, Jennifer. English Trans. of Latin source from Historia calamitatum and Letters 1-7, ed., J.T. Muckle and T. McLaughlin, Medieval Studies. He emphasizes that he sought her out specifically due to her literacy and learning, which was unheard of in most un-cloistered women of his era.
It is unclear how old Héloïse was at the time they became acquainted. During the twelfth century in France, the typical age at which a young person would begin attending university was between the ages of 12 and 15. As a young female, Heloise would have been forbidden from fraternizing with the male students or officially attending university at Notre Dame. With university education offered only to males, and convent education at this age reserved only for nuns, this age would have been a natural time for her uncle Fulbert to arrange for special instruction.