![]() It was hailed by Booklist 9 as “a lyrical, beautiful meditation on an all-consuming passion.” In 2004, former French publishing executive-turned-author Antoine Audouard released Farewell, My Only One: A Novel of Abelard and Heloise 8, turning the relationship into a love triangle involving the fictional narrator. These include a 1989 film adaptation of Marion Meade’s lusty 1979 novel Stealing Heaven 6 which “has everything a grand, passionate film could want – sex, religion, intellect, violence and elaborate costumes,” according to a New York Times review 7. The story of Heloise and Abelard continued to be re-imagined on the stage, screen and printed page in more recent decades. According to the website of bookseller James Cummins 4 (who has a copy of this book available for $2500), these letters “have little to do with the original Latin from which they purportedly derive,” but it was these letters that were then translated into English and “became the standard in the English-speaking world,” informing numerous works such as Alexander Pope’s renowned 1736 poem “Eloisa to Abelard.” 5 “For most of their printed history, the letters of Abelard and Heloise have been known chiefly through a series of impostures, freewheeling and highly colored fantasias on their writings pretending to be faithful translations,” William Levitan, translator of Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings 2, wrote in his book’s introduction.īy end of the 17 th century, he explained, a proliferation of “imposter texts” began circulating and bore “a decisive role in how Abelard and Heloise were understood for well over a hundred years.” He elaborated: The scene for this vogue was set in 1675 when Jacques Alluis, a lawyer from Grenoble, published a fictionalized account of Les amours d’Abailard et d’ Héloïse set in the form of a bourgeois romance, including many long passages of sentimental dialogue and such narrative innovations as romantic rendezvous set in gardens, a rival for Heloise’s affections named Alberic (identified as “a native of Rheims”), and scenes of scandalous misbehavior among the nuns at Argenteuil.Ī 1695 volume of Alluis’s novel was bound with copies of the letters exchanged between the lovers, loosely translated from Latin to French 3. Written about 15 years after they parted ways, the letter fell into the hands of Heloise who wrote in response to Abelard, spurring an impassioned and provocative correspondence between the long-separated lovers.įor more than nine centuries, this small collection of documents consisting of Abelard’s Calamities, four letters to him from Heloise, and three letters from Heloise to him, were enough to enchant generations of scholars, copyists and writers who left their mark in comments and additions which have become enmeshed in the common text, inviting debates about authenticity and inspiring a breathtaking body of literature. We know all of this based on Peter Abelard’s letter Story of Calamities 1 (also known as Historia calamitatum), an account of his life throughout the early 1130s, from emerging as the preeminent European philosopher of the 12 th-century, to this devastating affair with his student, Heloise. ![]() Afterward, upon her lover’s insistence and against her will, the young woman becomes a nun, while he takes religious vows as a monk in a separate monastery. The uncle, disapproving of the entire situation and furious over the damage to his reputation, arranges for his henchmen to castrate the groom. A torrid affair ensues, resulting in the birth of a child and a secret marriage. An accomplished and charismatic philosopher becomes her tutor and takes up residence in the household. These are the bare bones of the story: in 12 th century France, an unconventional, intellectually-gifted woman lives as the ward of her uncle in Paris. ![]() Why and how does this cultural obsession with Heloise and Abelard persist, and how does it blur the lines between fact and fiction, history and literature? A brief background It’s the story of Heloise and Abelard, which has for more than nine centuries captivated the intellectual curiosity and imaginations of numerous copyists, translators, historians, literary scholars, poets and novelists who each had a hand – however indirectly – in creating an enduring mythology. ![]() But long before the tortured romance between the offspring of the feuding Capulets and Montagues there was the hugely influential, true(ish) tale of a brilliant female scholar, her charismatic and accomplished tutor, and their doomed affair. When we think about timeless tales of forbidden love, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet might be the first that comes to mind. How this 900-year-old tale crosses the lines between history and literature to tempt our appetite for tragic romance ![]()
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