Abelard & Héloïse

A Medieval Love Story

How the correspondence between two lovers preserved their place in history as romantic icons

Written by Emily Staniforth

Once upon a time in medieval Paris, a man and a woman met and fell madly in love. Their names were Peter Abelard and Héloïse: two intellectuals whose relationship, though ill-fated, has inspired and fascinated people through the ages. But how do we know their story, and why are they remembered with such veneration? The simple answer is that the pair wrote a series of remarkable letters to one another in their later lives, recounting the story of how they met and discussing their relationship as well as matters of philosophy and religion. These letters have been preserved and studied since they were first discovered around 100 years after their deaths, and have provided an incredible insight into a loving, if doomed, relationship from the medieval period.

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER

In 1115, Peter Abelard was hired to tutor the young Héloïse by her uncle and guardian Fulbert, a canon at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “We do know that Abelard was a teacher and like any other teacher of his day he was a cleric. He was a very brilliant, argumentative figure and he would have been probably in his mid 30s when he met Héloïse,” says Constant J Mews, a professor of medieval religious history and thought at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “There’s a little bit of argument about the age of Héloïse but my judgement would be that she was probably about 20 or 21 when she met Abelard. There are some people that have a custom of imagining her to be very young. She had been brought up at the convent of Argenteuil but she was not technically a nun: she was living as a boarder.”

Héloïse lived a privileged life for a young woman of the time and her uncle’s position in the Church meant she had access to the finest education available in Paris. Highly intelligent, she was fluent in Latin, Hebrew and Greek. While it was common for women of Héloïse’s status to be educated, it would never be assumed that they would pursue a career as an intellectual in the same way that a man might. Héloïse lived in one of the houses in the cathedral area of Paris, and it is likely that it was during her time here that she first noticed Abelard. When a tutor needed to be hired, Abelard was the candidate of Héloïse’s choosing according to her own account of the time. “All that we kn