Textual Strategies in the Abelard/Heloise Correspondence

Abstract

When readers have not been plagued with the question of the authenticity of the famous correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, often they have focused on the question of Heloise’s conversion.¹ Do the letters illustrate a transformation in the heroine—spiritual, psychological, or rhetorical—or do they not? In fact, when seen as a rhetorical exercise, the correspondence frequently has been reduced to a didactic demonstration of such a conversion: a triumph of (male) intellect over (female) flesh.² The explosively sensual passages in Heloise’s letters are then explained away as mere rhetorical devices meant to brighten the argumentative contrast or raise the argumentative stakes between the combatants. Other commentators have argued differently, of course, maintaining that the Heloise of the letters did not repent and that in fact the correspondence reveals a portrait of a stubborn woman determined to remain true to her own feelings and experiences, even if those are considered sinful.³

The letters, viewed in the light of assumed parity, tell the story of Abelard’s rhetorical if not ethical conversion.