You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search. Written around , this Latin correspondence tells a story of love that is both of the body and the mind. In Paris, Abelard was regarded as a young [star] among the schoolmen of the monastic orders, whose theological lectures were considered dusty and boring as they commented endlessly on the traditions of the church fathers and earlier medieval thinkers. Other men used methods which were essentially like his, and even borrowed directly from his work, without losing their reputation for orthodoxy.
They admitted that some articles of the faith were beyond rational analysis and they were careful to find orthodox solution to problems in which they had cited conflicting authorities. They are now thought to have met sometime in , 16 at a time when Heloise was still fairly young. They cut off those parts of my body with which I had committed the act about which they mourned. Honestly, it was primarily the clerks and my students who crucified me with their intolerable grieving and lamenting, and I suffered more from their sympathy than from the pain of the wound, and I felt the shame more than the dismemberment.
Historia calamitatum reflects the guarded inner world that its author creates as a direct response to his mutilation and humiliation. In a way, it also reflects a painful internalization of the judgment rendered on him, and his love, by the world. I saw in Paris, in the house of a stranger, a certain clerk by the name of Fulbert received you and fed you with honor at his table, treating you as a member of his household and as an intimate friend. He also introduced you to his niece, a young girl of great abilities, and great prudence, engaging you to be her teacher.
You were not unmindful, but contemptuous, in the way you treated that man of noble birth, your host and Lord, a clergyman, the canon of the church of Paris, who hosted you free of charge and with honor.
Not sparing the virgin, whom you should have preserved and taught as a disciple, instead, with your spirit tossed about by unbridled lust, you taught her not to argue, but to commit fornication.
