Abelard and Heloise

Abelard was a poet, philosopher and theologian; Heloise was one of his students. This is a tragic love story, complete with lovers forced apart, a secret marriage, a castration and repeated exhumations. Happy Valentine's Day!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy the Wilson and I'm Holly from today. We
have something that has been for request of listeners. It

(00:22):
was also something I planned to do, and that is
the story of Abelard and Heloise. So. Abelard was a poet,
of philosopher and a theologian, and he was born uh
in Brittany, which is in northwest France today, in ten
seventy nine. And in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, he was quote the pre eminent philosopher and

(00:45):
theologian of the twelfth century. Helloise was one of his students,
and she was born right around the turn of the
twelfth century, and she was a respected abbess of a
prominent community of nuns. So they sort of had their
own lives there. But they are best known today for
their very tragic love story. It's been commemorated in poems, songs,

(01:07):
novels and films. If you've ever seen Being John Malkovich,
you may even remember the Avalarde and Hiloise puppet show
that features in that film. Um, this is a tragic
love story. It's one. I described the plot of it
to the boyfriend over the weekend, and every time I
would sort of get to a turning point, he would
go and then everyone's okay with that? Right? No, um,

(01:30):
this is complete. That's so hopeful, you know, honey. They
were not okay with that. It's complete with lovers who
were forced to part, a secret marriage, a castration, and
repeated exhumations, which is why we're talking about it right
before Valentine's Day. What's more romantic than an exclamation? Really,
I know, Well, the exhumations actually are kind of romantic

(01:53):
in a way, So we will get to that towards
the end of the episode. I'm laughing that awkward silent
laugh are known always comes out. My face is just
frozen in this odd scowl. Yeah, as as is often
the case, we're talking about this story because I kind
of love it, but it is very sad and and
disturbing in many ways. So yes, so we'll kick it

(02:16):
off with sort of the background of the whole thing,
and we should say at the front, we don't really
know very much about Heloise's life before she met Abelard.
We do not even know the identity of her parents.
On the other hand, Abelard had really made a name
for himself before Heloise was even born, and he wrote
his life story down in a letter which is known

(02:36):
as Historia calamitatum, or the Story of My Misfortunes. So
Pierre Abillard, also known as Peter Abelard, was the son
of a knight and his family was on the lower
wrungs of the nobility. His father was an educated man
and took pains to make sure that all of his
children were educated too, But as the eldest son, Abillard

(02:58):
was really meant to follow in his father's knightly footsteps,
and in doing so he would also be receiving a
sizeable inheritance. However, what Abbillard really loved was letters and learning,
and he gave up all of this potential knighthood to
become a philosopher. And as he described it, quote, I

(03:18):
fled utterly from the court of Mars that I might
win learning in the bosom of Minerva, which is a
lovely sentiment. This quite lovely. There are many lovely sentiments
in this story to go with the parts that are horrifying.
Um he became an inherent of Aristotle, also known as
a peripatetic, and the peripatetics purportedly got their name from

(03:40):
Aristotle's habit of pacing around while he was teaching, but
it also came to just generally described people who moved
around a lot, which applied to Abelard as well. By
the time he met Heloise, he'd spent years studying and
teaching Aristotelian philosophy and large logic all over what is
now France, and he had developed his own philosophy of language,

(04:03):
and along the way he studied in Paris under William
of Shampoo, who was another prominent theologian and logician at
the time, and it became the first of many conflicts
between Abelard and another public figure. Allard really picked apart
and debated William's teachings, and when he Abillard was judged
to be the winner, he was quite boastful about it
and unfortunately tried to shame and embarrass William. Not the

(04:26):
most noble behavior, uh and this simultaneously increased Abalard's reputation
and it caused him some understandable problems in the intellectual community.
It was kind of his standard way of relating to people.
He had a similar experience not long after with another
teacher and Salm of Leone, who he sought out to

(04:46):
learn from before later becoming his arrival. After leaving Leon,
Abillard went to Paris again and became scholar and residence
at Notre Dame. And that's when Heloise. His uncle Faubet,
sent Heloise to abb Lard for tutoring. Full Bear was
a cannon, which is a type of clergyman, so at
this point in the story, Abillard would have been about

(05:08):
thirty eight years old. Heloise's age is kind of subject
to debate because we don't know exactly when she was born.
It's cited as anywhere between seventeen and twenty five. And
here's how Abelard described Heloise in his Historia Calamitatum quote
of no mean beauty, she stood out above all by
reason of her abundant knowledge of letters. Now, this virtue

(05:31):
is rare among women, and for that very reason it
doubly graced the maiden and made her the most worthy
of renown in the entire kingdom. It was this young
girl whom I, after carefully considering all those qualities which
are wont to attract lovers, determined to unite with myself
in the bonds of love, and indeed the thing seemed
to me very easy to be done. Meanwhile, he described

(05:54):
himself as quote possessed of such advantages of youth and
comeliness that no matter what woman I might favor with
my love, I dreaded rejection of none. Not really uh
short on confidence. So the pair started out with a
written courtship, and eventually they wanted to have more face

(06:15):
to face conversations with one another. So Abillard convinced Heloise's
uncle to offer him lodgings in his house, which was
also near the school where he taught, and well, they're
basically gave Abelard free reign over Heloise's education. He wrote, quote,
the man's simplicity was nothing short of astounding to me.
I should not have been more smitten with wonder if

(06:36):
he had entrusted a tender lamb to the care of
a ravenous wolf. So that, to me sounds a little alarming,
but it's less romantic and more like, Yeah, he seems
a little creepy, But his description of their developing relationship
sounds a little bit less predatory because he says we
were united first in the dwelling that sheltered our love

(06:58):
and then in the hearts that burned with it, under
the pretext of study, we spent our hours and the
happiness of love. Heloise's point of view at the very
start of their relationship, really his, was not documented. Some
scholars argue that she was a willing participant, but others
point out passages from letters in which Abelard says that

(07:19):
he was sort of coercive and demanding, but in the
end she insisted that she loved him passionately and completely,
and their time together became so consuming and so extensive
that Adelarde started to shirk his other duties, both of
her education and of the school where he was supposed

(07:39):
to be teaching. And Heloise's uncle seemed blind to all
of this. So even as people gossiped and dropped hints
to the to him that something was up with his
niece and her teacher, uh, he didn't seem to catch on,
and when he inevitably did wise up to it after
several months, Heloise's uncle, as one would anticipate, separated them.

(08:00):
Abillard is quite poetic about this too. He says each
grieved most not for himself, but for the other. Each
thought to allay not his own sufferings but those of
the one he loved. The very sundering of our bodies
served but to link our souls closer together. The plenitude
of the love which was denied to us inflamed us

(08:22):
more than ever. Sometime after her uncle found them out,
Heloise realized she was pregnant, and she told Abelard that
she was so. One night, while her uncle was away,
Abelard spirited her out of the house and sent her
to live with his sister in Brittany until the baby
was born. Halloiss Uncle, no surprise, was outraged. Abillard went

(08:44):
to him and begged for forgiveness, insisting that he and
Heloise truly loved one another. He offered to marry Heloise
in secret, and Filbert agreed, but neither one of them
really wanted to get married. They both sort of looked
at marriage as this morally weak way to get away
with having physical lust. Getting married would also have been
a huge blow to Avalard's reputation, and it would have

(09:07):
put a cap on how far he could advance in
the church, since the highest levels of the clergy couldn't
really marry, and since church was really the only path
for somebody who had Abelard's education at that point this
was a problem. If he married her, he was going
to be stalling his career permanently. But he was willing

(09:28):
to do it because it seemed like the only way
to appease her uncle's fury. Abillard went back to Brittany
to retrieve Heloise and to marry her, but she actually
refused him. She said that the plan was too dangerous,
that she was not willing to sacrifice his potential in
his reputation, and that there was no way her uncle
was really going to forgive Abelard anyway, just because he

(09:48):
married her. According to Avlard, after going on just at
length about how damaging marriage and children were to the
study of philosophy, Eloise said this, if layman and gentiles
bound by no profession of religion lived after this fashion,
what ought you a cleric and a cannon do, in

(10:08):
order not to prefer base voluptuousness to your sacred duties,
to prevent this charibdis from sucking you down headlong, and
to save yourself from being plunged shamelessly and irrevocably into
such filth as this not a favorite of the idea
of marriage at all? Yeah, what a pity, She went

(10:32):
on to say how much sweeter and romantic it would
be for her to be his mistress rather than his wife,
because love would be a stronger bond between them than
marriage could ever be, And in doing this, Heloise was
basically saying she would sacrifice herself entirely for Avalard's sake
to allow him to have her without standing in the
way of his life and career, while she would endure

(10:52):
basically all the consequences. Avalard could not be convinced, though,
and she finally gave up, saying, then there is no
more left but this, that in our doom, the sorrow
yet to come, shall be no less than the love
we two have already known, which is some foreshadowing. When

(11:13):
the baby was born, she named it Astrolabe, and they
left him with Abalard's sister and returned to Paris to
be married in secret very early one morning, in the
presence of Heloise's uncle and some of Abillard's friends, and Heloise,
being an intelligent woman, was definitely right about her uncle.
Even though their marriage was supposed to be a secret,

(11:35):
Fulbert told other people that they had gotten married, so
Heloise publicly insisted that her uncle was lying, which infuriated him,
and fearing for her safety, Abillard sent her to the
convent where she had been educated when she was younger,
a place outside of Paris called Argentoya. They continued to
see one another. There's a passage in one of Heloise's

(11:57):
letters and which she talks about making love in a
corner of the convent itself. But Helloy's his uncle, interpreted
her entry into the convent as a ploy by Abillard
to get rid of her. So he bribed the servants
in the house where Abelard was staying so they could
get access to his rooms, and he sent his own
servants to break into Abelard's room in the middle of
the night, where they actually castrated him. So, according to Abelard,

(12:24):
the next morning there was an enormous crowd who came out.
It reads as though he's saying that they were mourning
the loss of his man parts. Probably it was, this
is the mark of the translation, that it was really
that people were extremely upset at the uh the physical
disfigurement he had undergone. And it's not so much just

(12:47):
the loss of physical sexual prowess. Right, So he says,
it is difficult, nay impossible for words of mine to
describe the amazement which bewildered them, the lamentations they uttered,
the uproar with which they harassed me, or the grief
with which they increased my own suffering. He simultaneously bemoaned

(13:09):
his fate and saw it as a fitting punishment, since
it had removed from him the part of his body
with which he had sinned. Abelard retreated to the monastery
at sun Denis. At first, this was more to hide
from what had happened to him than out of any
newfound religious devotion. He became a monk, and Heloise, who
at this point was already sheltering at a convent, took

(13:31):
vows and became a Benedictine nun. While at Sandoni, Abillard
tried to continue with his life of study and teaching,
but to turn his attention to faith instead of philosophy.
But the monastery at Sandony was, in Abalard's were words
quote utterly worldly, and its abbot was corrupt. Abalard became

(13:52):
popular as a teacher, even as he criticized the monastery
and tried very hard to reform it. His constant and
criticism na trually drew the ire of the other teachers
and monks at the monastery who all rallied against him
and complained about him to bishops, archbishops, and any other
church official who would listen. He also, while he was there,
wrote books that were deemed to be heretical, and his

(14:15):
previous feuds with other philosophical and religious thinkers, which we
referenced at the beginning of the podcast, kind of came
back to haunt him. Abillard fled to Champagne and became
a hermit. Students of philosophy continued to seek him out
to try to get him to return to teaching, but
he did, but he was constantly criticized and scrutinized for

(14:35):
applying logic to matters of faith, and that was a
practice that was viewed as very threatening to the medieval church.
After a while, he and his students created this community
of teaching and learning that they called law Paraclete. Eventually,
he handed law Paraclete over to Helloise and the nuns
from the convent where she'd been staying because their convent
had been disbanded after some internal church feuding. She became

(15:00):
the abbess at La Periclet, and Heloise became highly respected
in her own right. At this point. Being an abbess
required skill in both administrative and religious work, and she
drew praise from Peter the Venerable and other prominent religious figures.
She was also fluent in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and
she taught these languages to the other nuns as well.

(15:22):
Avelarne continued to teach and to serve as an abbot,
although his skeptical manner of approaching religious thought continued to
draw fire. Eventually he wound up because of this, being
accused of heresy, and he was condemned at a council
at Fants in eleven forty. His sentence was lifted only
after Peter the Venerable intervened. Avelard's health started to really fail,

(15:47):
and he died in eleven forty two. Peter the Venerable
built a tomb for him in Saint Marcel, but Heloise
had him moved and reburied at La Periclete so that
she could watch over him. She lived another twenty years
before dying sometime in eleven sixty three or eleven sixty four.
La Periclet also became a highly respected convent under under

(16:10):
her leadership, with six daughter houses as well, and there's
a story that she was actually buried in Abalard's grave,
but there's no substantiation of that in the record. She
was buried next to him, and their burial place was
moved to a drier location in four In sixteen sixteen,
the letters that she and Abelard had exchanged between each

(16:32):
other were published for the first time, and in sixteen
twenty one the nuns at La Periclet moved their bodies
to a new and more impressive tomb to satisfy curious visitors.
They repeated this whole exhumation and reburial a few more
times in conjunction, most of the time with new translations
of the letters coming out and sort of influx of

(16:53):
Abelard and Heloise letter tourists to constantly u upgrade the
setting for the addition crowds. I presume yes. In the
early nineteenth century, Avalard and Helloy's removed to the cemetery
Pearl Chase in Paris, where they are today. They lie
together in a stone sarcophagus carved with both of their resemblances,
and it's under a roof supported by pillars and arches.

(17:16):
The tomb in pear Le Chaise was designed by Alexandra
Marie Lenoire, who was the director of the Muse de
monument Francaise between seventeen ninety and eighteen sixteen. Lenoir actually
obtained their remains from La Paraclete in eighteen hundred and
then created this tomb that had sort of a faux
medieval look and feel, and he incorporated some pieces from

(17:41):
what was reported to be some of the earlier tombs
that had existed at La Peraclet. The tomb itself is
more about being evocative of their lives and their love
story than authentic to the art and architecture of the
period in which they lived. We believe that the real
remains are probably buried there becaus they were measured and
authenticated when Ludwar acquired them. So anytime bodies get moved

(18:05):
that many times there's always a question markup. Is that
really who we think it is? They were verified, especially
since the remains started out in the twelfth century. UM.
Before we talk about these letters that they exchanged with
each other and their other writings, let's take another moment
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Linda dot com slash history stuff and that is l

(19:07):
y n d A dot com. And now to return
to Abelard and Heloise. They both wrote extensively. Heloise's writings
primarily included letters to abial Ard and to other religious figures,
and then Abelard's writings also include works on theology, metaphysics, logic,
the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. He

(19:29):
also wrote poetry and songs, and some of these were
about Heloise. He never explicitly credited her, but modern scholars
contend that Heloise really was quite influential when it came
to Abalard's thoughts in the area of ethics. This is
a reversal of older scholarship which claimed that Heloise's thoughts
were borrowed in their entirety from abial Art. Yeah has

(19:50):
to do with how focused she was on the idea
of hypocrisy and how the life you're living outwardly should
match up with the life that you're living inwardly, which
she herself was very distressed by that idea, given the
fact that she had got into a convent for reasons
other than a spiritual devotion. So they're in addition to

(20:12):
all this. They are the letters that Abilard and Heloise
wrote to each other after their relationship had ended. The
first one was to Abillard from Heloise after she had
read his Historia Calamitatum. He wrote this about fifteen years
after their relationship had ended, and when Heloise got it
and read it, she was deeply distressed and very worried

(20:32):
by what she read there about his mental state and
how they had depicted their relationship, and like she was
also quite angry that in twelve years he had not
once expressed concern or gratitude for her joining the convent,
which she had not really wanted to do. And she
had done entirely as like a sacrifice for his sake.

(20:52):
Her personal letters are very passionate and very pained. She
wrote of how upset she is that, as we referenced
a moment ago, she took thous and because she loved Abalard,
not because she loved God. She also wrote of how
much she loved Ablard, saying things like my heart was
not in me but with you, and now even more,

(21:15):
if it is not with you, it is nowhere. Truly
without you, it cannot exist. She also wrote of her
sexual frustration, quote, even during the celebration of Mass, when
our prayers should be purer, lewed, visions of these pleasures
take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my
thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on our prayers.

(21:36):
I should be groaning over the sins I have committed,
but I can only sigh for what I have lost.
At one point in her letters, she accused Abillard of
feeling only lust for her and not love, and in
a reply he agreed with her, that's not what you
want to hear back. Abilard's letters are reserved, they're a
bit luxury, and they're really lacking in romance. So some

(22:00):
people framed this as Abalard being rational while Heloise is emotional.
But a lot of Abalard's writing really is quite emotional too,
It's just that all of his emotion is directed toward
religious matters and his sort of personal torment uh and
what his life has become, while Heloise's emotion is all

(22:22):
directed at Abalarde. And they also exchange letters of direction
about how to establish a rule for her community of nuns,
and they discussed matters of faith in scripture, So not
all of their correspondence was just I loved you, I
loved you, I loved you so much, and you kind
of dropped the ball and him. Most of the time,

(22:43):
when you find collections of them, they're they're divided into
like the more personal letters and the more spiritual letters,
where they address questions about scriptures and how laperic Let
should operate and that kind of thing. There is some
debate about the authenticity of these letters. You know, their
relationship happened during the eleven eleven hundreds, but the oldest

(23:07):
copies of these letters are from the thirteen hundreds, so
naturally this has led to speculation about whether they each
really wrote everything that was attributed to them, and the
three schools of thoughts are that they're exactly what they're
said to be that and then there's another that is
that Abelard in fact wrote all of the letters, and
then there's another that some other unrelated person wrote them

(23:31):
later on as a bit of medieval fanfic. Uh. The
overall but you know, definitely not a hundred percent unanimous
consensus is that they are what they say they are,
that their letters from Abillard to Helloween's and vice versa.
Because they are so old, you can read many of
them on the internet for free, should you be so inclined. Yes,

(23:58):
Happy Valentine found they castration And we don't really or
at least I couldn't find what happened to baby Asterlabe,
like we know that. Yeah, I don't remember ever hearing
about that. Yeah, baby aster Labe stayed in Brittany with
Abelard's sister. But otherwise, like, don't really have any sense

(24:20):
of that. Yeah, and it's interesting to me that they
have been uh buried many times together when it seems like,
at least from romantic point of view, things had kind
of fizzled out. Yeah, well they were the time they

(24:40):
were both deceased. Yeah, they're there. I think they're there.
Romantic relationship with one another seems to have come to
a complete halt, uh from the time that he was castrated.
I think had he not been castrated, they probably would
have continued to have some kind of in secret relationship

(25:02):
with one another. But that then, once that happened, it
wasn't just because he did not have the physical parts anymore,
but because that was such a hugely devastating experience for him.
He felt completely shamed by the whole thing. He had
sort of become this public figure who had been literally

(25:23):
disfigured because of this whole thing. Like he was like, no,
now I'm going to devote my whole life to this
other thing. I think Hellois, though, continued to for the
rest of her life, even after their correspondent stopped being
about how much she missed him and how much she
loved him. I think she really cared that for It
certainly seems that way. Do you have some listener mail

(25:43):
for us? I do, and it is not about this.
This is actually so sometimes I go through the inbox
for some reason and I find something that I meant
to read a long time ago that then I forgot
about all flag things and then go, oh, I forgot
to read the Yeah, this was in my flag for
follow up file, and I went, oh, yeah, I meant
to read this. Uh. And this is from Alicia, and

(26:05):
Alicia's is writing to us about our say shan agone
episode from a while back. She said, I wanted to
write in response to say Shangon in the hay On Court.
This is a topic I'm well acquainted with, given that
I'm majored in East Asian studies in college. Not only
have I read the Pillow Book for class, including having
written a list in the style of Stay Show, and

(26:27):
mine was a list of fish and included shark week,
but I've also read a variety of other hay On
and uh Kamakura era diaries. I just had a couple
of notes. You mentioned the clothing, but an important aspect
that you only hinted at was how much clothing served
as a status symbol. Like many courts, the kind of clothing,
as well as colors one could wear, was directly related

(26:49):
to one's status. This is especially true and the hay
On era court. So many of these diaries include elaborate
descriptions of clothing because it tells a lot about the
person in question. I also wanted to give out to
my favorite lady in Japanese court, Lady Niju. Unlike Shikibu
or showed a Gon, she is basically unknown, despite the
fact that she's a very impressive woman who, unlike the

(27:11):
other two, seems to have demonstrated serious political savvy. It
is speculated that had her father not passed away, she
could have been empress and said she was a consort
to the Emperor go Fuka Usa. Her diary, known in
English as Confessions of Lady Niju or tew Asu Gatari.
I hope I have done that correctly, which literally translates

(27:34):
to an unasked for tale, is one of my favorite books.
It includes a lot of the same slice of court
life details, including a several year long bondside competition, and
a very long and complicated incident involving the gruel stick
ceremony you mentioned. If you enjoyed the Pillow Book, I
highly recommend it. Thank you so much, Alicia. Indeed, I'm

(27:54):
sorry that I did not read this before now, because
that is from back at the beginning of December that
she wrote this. Well, yes, it does unless you are
Abalard and Heloise, at which point time makes it exactly
the same, except with a new final resting place that

(28:15):
maybe moved later. So if you would like to write
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(28:37):
a little more about what we've talked about today, you
can come to our website and put the words Atalard
and Heloise in the search bar, and you will find
our article ten of History's most torrid love Affairs. We
can do all of that and a whole lot more
at our website, which is how stepworks dot com for

(28:58):
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(29:21):
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