Listening To Heloise : The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman (The New Middle Ages)

Rating:
Summary: Cutting-edge Scholarship
Review: Anyone who has ever read Abelard's Historia calamitatum and the Letters of Abelard and Heloise will be very interested in this collection of fifteen essays on Heloise (a.d. ?1101-1163/64?), Abbess of the Paraclete. My favorite is "Authenticity Revisited" by John Marenbon, which is a breath of fresh air in "one of the longest-running controversies in medieval scholarship". Marenbon and most - but not all - of the scholars who contributed to this book believe that Heloise did indeed write the famous letters which bear her name. Two essays, by Constant J. Mews and John O. Ward and Neville Chiavaroli, examine a newly re-evaluated series of letters which may well be love letters exchanged by Abelard and Heloise before their ill-fated marriage! Most of the other essays fall into the category of literary criticism, several from a feminist perspective, but the opening essay, by historian Mary Martin McLauglin, tells us more about "Heloise the Abbess: The Expansion of the Paraclete".