So far at Agnes Scott, my favorite course has been History 343: Love, Family, and Marriage in Pre-Modern Europe, taught by Professor Manes. This class was an absolute blast. I’ve always been interested in historical gender dynamics, so this course was perfect for me. But I never expected that some of the things I’d learn would be so hilarious and awesome that I’d end up relaying the stories to friends at entirely different schools.
So buckle up and get ready for wild twelfth century shenanigans.
Part One: Abelard and Heloise
We started off the class with the tale of a famous love story – Abelard and Heloise, martyrs to love. To this day, couples still visit their graves in France to leave flowers.
Maybe once I tell you their actual story, you’ll find this as weird as I do.
Abelard was a 12th century French philosopher and scholar. Because all scholars basically belonged to the Church, he was also supposed to be celibate. That idea went up in flames rather quickly.
You see, when Abelard moved to Paris he started hearing about this girl named Heloise. She was smart but also a noted beauty. Abelard became obsessed with her and decided upon the obvious course: befriend her uncle and sole guardian, become her tutor, and use his position to seduce her. If you’re wondering exactly how old Heloise is at this point, trust me, I was too.
As it happens, Heloise fell for his advances. Abelard and Heloise soon carried on an affair in Heloise’s uncle’s house, right under his nose. But from the sound of it, they weren’t exactly discrete. All of Paris seemed to know what was going on, but Fullbert, Heloise’s uncle, refused to believe the talk… until he walked in on the amorous couple in media res. There was no denying it after that.
Things didn’t end there. If Fullbert wasn’t angry enough, Heloise became pregnant. With Abelard’s help, Heloise ran off to the countryside to stay with his sister. There she gave birth to a son which both parents promptly ignored. Seriously, he’s mentioned like twice in the surviving letters.
Around then, Abelard decided to go to Fullbert and deal with this crisis. Fullbert wanted Abelard to marry Heloise, but getting married would seriously marr Abelard’s reputation in the Church (that whole celibacy thing again, remember?). In the end they reached a compromise: Abelard would marry Heloise, but it would be a secret marriage.
But when Abelard told Heloise about this solution, she protested. She didn’t want to marry him! She said it was unfitting to his career. Instead, she proposed that she continue on as his mistress. I found this extremely surprising and against everything I’d ever been told about medieval women. Heloise must have been a true character.
However, Abelard eventually did get her to agree to the marriage and the pair returned to Paris. To keep in line with the whole “secret marriage” thing, Abelard stashed Heloise in a local convent. According to later letters, the location didn’t impede their amorous activities in the slightest.
Meanwhile, Fullbert thought the secret marriage was a horrible compromise. The whole point of a marriage would be to restore Heloise’s honor and by extent Fullbert’s own. If no one knew about the marriage, his reputation was still in jeopardy.
So Fullbert plotted his revenge. He bribed Abelard’s servants, and in the middle of the night he sent an assassin who castrated Abelard.
Funnily, this incident tends to get left out of the more romanticized versions.
Suffice to say that Abelard was not happy. But if he couldn’t have Heloise, he didn’t want anyone else to have her either. He ordered her to take vows to become a nun, and she obeyed. After she was safely out of reach of other men, Abelard took vows himself and became a monk. He then proceeded to not contact her for twelve years.
Heloise is pretty upset by this. She gets a hold of a copy of a letter he’s writing to a guy named Philintus, which is basically Abelard just moaning about how sucky his life has been. She expresses sympathy for what he’s been through but also begs him to actually write her. She tells him that she still loves him and that while outwardly she may wear the habit of a nun, she still delights in the memories of their transgressions and cannot be penitent.
Abelard and Heloise exchange several letters. In his last letter to Heloise, Abelard says they should stop corresponding and focus on God instead. Abelard dies in a monastery, and Heloise in a convent.
Honestly, what’s so romantic about their story? I can easily believe that Heloise loved Abelard, but I’m not entirely convinced Abelard was thinking with his heart and not something lower down. His letters have a seriously creepy undertone, although it may be par for course in Medieval Europe to refer to your crush as your “prey” and to make references to physical force.
All that I ask is that before you start gushing about the powerful love of Abelard and Heloise, you sit back and ask yourself if this relationship was really the height of romance.
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