Abstract
Much has happened since the publication in 1999 of my study of the Epistolae duorum amantium (EDA), a remarkable and enigmatic collection of over one hundred love letters and poems, discovered by Johannes de Vepria, a bibliophile monk of Clairvaux in the late fifteenth century.1 New insights continue to emerge about an exchange in which the man reveals himself to be a celebrated and controversial teacher, while the young woman with whom he is infatuated presents herself as an ardent student of philosophy, with a particular interest in ethics. Sylvain Piron has produced a new translation of the entire corpus into French, that fully brings out their originality and great beauty. He brings forward fresh arguments for attributing them to Abelard and Heloise.2 There have also been new translations into German and Italian, although without detailed analysis of their content.3 A popular biography by James Burge that draws on these love letters has helped generate wider interest in Heloise as a woman who challenged convention.4 Umberto Eco silently incorporated extracts from these letters into a historical novel, implying that they were an elaborate hoax of his twelfth-century male hero, writing to the wife of Barbarossa.5 While there has been positive support for the attribution from a number of scholars, others have expressed caution about accepting arguments too quickly. Could not the imagery about love in these letters be conventional medieval tropes, invented by anybody?6
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Notes
Sylvain Piron, Lettres des deux amants, attribuées à Héloïse et Abélard (Paris: Gallimard 2005)
Umberto Eco, Baudolino (Milan: Bompiani, 2000), pp. 84–85
C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love. In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 157–73.
See the essays collected in Constant J. Mews, ed., Listen Daughter. The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Peter Dronke, Giovanni Orlandi, “New Works by Abelard and Heloise,” Filologia mediolatina 12 (2005): 123–177
Jan Ziolkowski, “Lost and Not Yet Found: Heloise, Abelard, and the Epistolae duorum amantium,” Journal of Medieval Latin 14 (2004): 171–202.
See William D. Patt, “The Early ‘ars dictaminis’ as Response to a Changing Society,” Viator 9 (1978): 133–55
Constant J. Mews, “Hugh Metel, Heloise and Peter Abelard: The Letters of an Augustinian Canon and the Challenge of Innovation in Twelfth-Century Lorraine,” in Viator 32 (2001): 59–91.
Carol Dana Lanham, Salutatio Formulas in Latin Letters to 1200: Syntax, Style and Theory (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2004 originally published 1975), pp. 49–52.
Jacques Dalarun, “Nouveaux aperçus sur Abélard, Héloïse et le Paraclet,” Francia 32 (2005): 19–66
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© 2008 Neville Chiavaroli and Constant J. Mews
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Mews, C.J. (2008). New Discoveries and Insights (1999–2007). In: The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05921-5_7
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