{"id":2013,"date":"2018-11-25T20:49:56","date_gmt":"2018-11-26T01:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/?p=2013"},"modified":"2018-11-25T20:49:56","modified_gmt":"2018-11-26T01:49:56","slug":"teaching-abelard-and-heloise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2018\/11\/25\/teaching-abelard-and-heloise\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of 2018’s wearying inevitabilities is that even the most cursory glance at the news is likely to bring you a fresh tale of sexual assault\u2014and that much of the resulting commentary is bound to be almost as jarring as the news article itself. So many people are so very invested in making the unconscionable seem tolerable, even natural. Reading one such story recently brought me back to the first time I visited the P\u00e8re Lachaise cemetery<\/a> in Paris, when I didn’t have to pore over a map in order to find the tomb of Peter Ab\u00e9lard and his wife, H\u00e9lo\u00efse of Argenteuil. <\/p>\n

Despite the dreary autumn weather, it drew a steady stream of visitors, probably second in number only to those drawn to the grave of The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison. Many of those who gathered around the couple’s supposed burial site (whether or not the remains Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse truly lie inside the tomb, an early nineteenth-century confection made out of actual medieval masonry, is a matter of dispute) were young women. Several of them wore large crowns of artificial flowers\u2014the tail-end of that summer’s fad\u2014although the flowers they lay at the railings surrounding the tomb were real.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The tomb of Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse in the P\u00e8re Lachaise Cemetery. [Source<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Why were so many young people drawn to this monument to two people who’ve been dead for 800 years? A cursory search online suffices to answer that question, and also shows some of the persistent themes in how Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse are framed, particularly for a popular audience. They are “one of history\u2019s most passionate and romantic true love stories<\/a> … [with] much to teach us about our own understanding of religious tolerance, sexual equality and intellectual freedom”; their relationship was one of the “top 10 most torrid love affairs<\/a>” ever; the distressing way in which their relationship ended “ultimately served as a catalyst<\/a> for their greatest intellectual achievements.” One writer in the New York Times<\/em><\/a> even assures us that “there’s a grandeur to high-stakes romance, to self-sacrifice, that’s missing from our latex-love culture — and it’s a grandeur we perhaps crave to recover.”<\/p>\n

(Yes, you read that last quotation correctly. Someone in a national newspaper argued that condom use is a sign that people in the twenty-first century no longer know how to engage in sweeping romance, which is a hot take of a kind that I think even Emily Bront\u00eb at her most wuthering would have balked at.)<\/p>\n

This framing of Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse’s relationship isn’t unique to pop history, of course. The first time I heard of them, during an undergraduate survey course on medieval history, they were referred to as one of the great love stories of the Middle Ages. Even at the time, reading their letters to one another, I felt uneasy with that framing, but it was not until much later that I would acquire the vocabulary to help me articulate that unease: coercion, gaslighting, manipulation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Jean Vignaud, “Abelard and Heloise Surprised by the Abbot Fulbert”, 1819. [Joslyn Art Museum<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here is the story of Peter Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse of Argenteuil as I lay it out to my students now. In the early twelfth-century, a young man from Brittany called\u00a0Peter Ab\u00e9lard arrived in Paris, and quickly made a name for himself as a highly promising student at the university there. Also resident in the city was one Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and his niece H\u00e9lo\u00efse. Ab\u00e9lard heard of H\u00e9lo\u012bse’s beauty and intelligence, and having decided\u2014before he had ever met her\u2014that “she was the one to bring to [his] bed<\/a>“, Ab\u00e9lard “sought an opportunity of getting to know her through private daily meetings and so more easily winning her over.” Fulbert agreed to hire Ab\u00e9lard as H\u00e9lo\u00efse’s teacher, to provide her with the kind of university-level education that would not ordinarily have been available to a woman. At this point, Ab\u00e9lard was in his mid-thirties, H\u00e9lo\u00efse perhaps in her late teens.<\/p>\n

Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse entered into a sexual relationship. To make sure that no one would suspect them of this, Ab\u00e9lard sometimes beat her, though he wrote that his “blows were the marks not of anger but of the tender affection that is sweeter than any perfume.” There was little subterfuge could do to hide the consequences of their sexual activities, though, once H\u00e9lo\u00efse became pregnant. Ab\u00e9lard sent her to Brittany to give birth to their son, then secretly married her, then bundled her off to the convent of Argenteuil. H\u00e9lo\u00efse’s relatives assumed, based on this, that Ab\u00e9lard had abandoned her, and so revenged themselves on him by beating him up and castrating him. Ab\u00e9lard\u2014now barred by his marital status from pursuing an ecclesiastical career and by his impotence from fulfilling a key component of the medieval understanding of a husband’s role\u2014became a monk. H\u00e9lo\u00efse became a nun, and later abbess of the famous monastery of the Paraclete.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A romanticised, 19th-century imagining of H\u00e9lo\u00efse, from a wall painting in a Parisian church. [Source<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In later years, Ab\u00e9lard wrote a kind of memoir, the Historia Calamitatum<\/em> (“History of my Misfortunes”), and the couple exchanged a series of lengthy letters\u2014intelligent, erudite, full of references to scripture and classical literature\u2014from their respective monastic communities. H\u00e9lo\u00efse seems to have borne little animosity towards Ab\u00e9lard, beyond chastising him for not writing to her often enough. She may not have understood her relationship with Ab\u00e9lard as one in any way marked by abuse or assault, and as Irina Dumitrescu rightly reminds us<\/a>, we “diminish H\u00e9lo\u00efse if we see her as an eternal teenager, a mere victim of Abelard\u2019s narcissistic love.”<\/p>\n

And yet, when I sit with H\u00e9lo\u00efse’s letters, I can’t help but hear a woman whose life, whose very self, was shaped by a teacher whose pedagogy emphasised submission and a culture which eroticised violence against women. In her letters, H\u00e9lo\u00efse refers to Ab\u00e9lard as master (dominus<\/em>), father, husband; she calls herself his slave (ancilla<\/em>), daughter, and wife. She would rather be his whore (meretrix<\/em>) than an empress (imperatrix<\/em>), she writes, which when taken alone has a thrilling ring of the empowered modern woman to it, but is rather less so when you see how repeatedly H\u00e9lo\u00efse defines herself in relationship to Ab\u00e9lard and his wants.<\/p>\n

One of the great love stories of the Middle Ages? I suppose that depends on how you define the term “great.”<\/p>\n

Or the term \u201clove.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Angelica Maria Kauffmann, “The Parting of Abelard and Heloise”, ca. 1780. [Hermitage Museum<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A few weeks ago, I introduced the students in the upper-level undergraduate course I’m teaching on medieval women’s history to Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse. The students had read Carissa Harris’ article on the medieval English literary genre known as the pastourelle<\/em><\/a>\u2014which Harris argues both normalised rape narratives and provided space to challenge rape myths\u2014as part of a broader discussion of the history of ideas around sexual consent, assault, and bodily autonomy. Thinking about the modern framing of\u00a0Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse as the quintessential passionate romance helped us to complicate ideas about the barbaric Middle Ages and the enlightened present. As young adults who’ve come of age during the #MeToo movement, they were far quicker to grasp the disturbing implications of Peter and H\u00e9lo\u00efse’s relationship than I was as an undergraduate.<\/p>\n

I’m proud of the ways in which my students navigated multiple conversations about sexual assault that week\u2014deploying analytical skills and fierce empathy in equal measure\u2014but I still don’t know if I did them justice in the classroom. It’s one thing to talk about how Peter Ab\u00e9lard’s historical reputation has largely survived the condemnation of his own words. It’s another to have that conversation in an academic setting, within a system and a space where diversity statements say one thing and actions another.<\/p>\n

Is it possible to sit in an American college classroom in 2018, to be in a position of authority and to talk honestly about the lessons to be learned from Ab\u00e9lard and H\u00e9lo\u00efse and yet avoid being a hypocrite?<\/p>\n

The words change. More voices speak out. But who tells the story, and how it ends: well, that always seems to stay the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of 2018’s wearying inevitabilities is that even the most cursory glance at the news is likely to bring you a fresh tale of sexual …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[39,11,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-of-gender","category-medievalism","category-teaching"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1921,"url":"https:\/\/yvonneseale.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/08\/publication-round-up-vi\/","url_meta":{"origin":2013,"position":0},"title":"Publication Round-up VI","author":"admin","date":"March 8, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Articles \"'As It Was in the Beginning': Teaching the History of Medieval Religion in an Age of Faith-Based Conflict\", in History Matters!: The Bulletin of the National Council for History Education 31:7 (March 2019). 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