Introduction

Abstract

“The most intensely personal documents of the entire twelfth century.”¹ This scholarly assessment of the letters of Heloise and Abelard is well supported by the cherished themes reflected in the texts just quoted. Even after nearly a millennium it is this personal quality that explains the survival of their names and images in various popular reactions. To note only a few of these allusions in several places and genres, beginning with the most frivolous, a casual reference in The New Yorker magazine (16 December 2002), describing another couple’s close attachment, compares it to “gin and tonic or Heloise and Abelard.” Long before, in a 1988 movie Stealing Heaven, their story was retold in its most salacious form, and a later film, the 1999 Being John Malkovich, exploits the couple’s sexual passion in a hilarious puppet scene. Their tragic love affair has been the heart of an opera performed in New York’s Juilliard Theater on 21 April 2002 (the 960th anniversary of Abelard’s death) and reviewed in The New York Times the next day. We might already have met Heloise alone, less than three years earlier, as the “Ultimate Lover,” a unique figure, portrayed in an article presenting an “album of archetypal personalities” in The New York Times Magazine (17 October 1999). Truer to their later lives is the occasional appearance of both Heloise and Abelard, often at their monastery, the Paraclete, in the historical mysteries set in the twelfth century by Sharan Newman, herself a medievalist. The couple’s son, Astralabe, is the hero of the most recent addition to this series, entitled simply Heresy.²

I was so well aware of her knowledge and her love of literary studies. This would mean that, even when we were parted, the exchange of letters could bring us together, and since it is often possible to write more boldly than one can speak, we could always converse delightfully with one another.

Abelard: Letter 1: A Story of Calamities

You have written your friend a long letter of consolation, ostensibly about his misfortunes, but really about your own.

Heloise to Abelard: Letter 2

I am living even now in this danger and every day I feel that a sword is hanging over my head, so that I can scarcely breathe easily from one meal to the next.

Abelard: Letter 1: A Story of Calamities