Books
Constant craving
by Nick Smith
For nearly 1000 years Abelard and Heloise have inspired art, literature and song. Now a New Zealander has brought to light more revelations about the legendary love story.
Dr Constant Mews, the New Zealander who discovered the lost love letters of legendary 12th-century lovers Abelard and Heloise, says you’d be hard pressed to find a library more far-flung from the great centres of learning than the one at Auckland University. But it was there, in 1974, that he picked up a Latin edition of a collection of love letters by anonymous medieval sweethearts, “an amazing literary treasure that … was ignored by scholars for 25 years”. It was another 25 years before Mews could determine their provenance. “Scholarship takes you outside the great centres of European learning,” he says. “For anyone prepared to learn Latin, you can access this great treasure.”
And what a treasure: 113 previously unknown epistles from proto-feminist and pro-sex Heloise and the revolutionary teacher Peter Abelard, a relationship that has been mythologised in art and literature for nearly 1000 years. And that was on the basis of only eight letters, written after the affair. One of which, of course, is Abelard’s famous letter to a friend, “Historia Calamitatum”, or “history of my calamities” (which, indeed, were many).
As Mews notes, the lovers are mythic figures, whose “story reaches so far and touches issues of passion and reason, eroticism and love, which are very profound.
“What these [new] letters bring together is an astonishing eroticism, coupled with a very serious reflection, certainly on [Heloise’s] part, on the nature of love.”
And it is Mews’s discovery of these lost letters that has directly led to the publication in the space of a few months of not one, but four new books. Mews’s Abelard and Heloise joins James Burge’s Heloise and Abelard, Antoine Audouard fictionalises the affair in his French novel Farewell, My Only One and, for the first time, a French translation of Mews’s The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard will be published.
There is also talk of a fifth book and the movie must surely be in the pipeline. Mews plumps for Cate Blanchett or Kate Winslet as Heloise. As for Abelard, please God, not Russell Crowe, he begs.
Robert Dessaix has argued that bland eroticism has overtaken society since the death of romantic love. These extraordinary letters are a reminder of the transformative power of romantic love, not to mention the almost perverse self-sacrifice and subsuming of the individual that marks this destructive but magnificent relationship. And where would romance be without tragedy?
Abelard was already a famous philosopher, composer and theologian (he was the first person to use theology in its modern sense) when, in 1115, he met Heloise, the brilliant niece of Fulbert, a canon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and already famous throughout France for her know-ledge of letters.
Although there is doubt over the ages, Mews says Heloise was about 21, while Abelard was 36 when they embarked on their illicit and dangerous affair.
Theirs was a meeting of minds and, as Mews notes, Heloise quickly claimed intellectual equality with her teacher and lover.
“Heloise is profoundly shaped by love of classical philosophy,” says Mews, “particularly an ideal of friendship that traditionally has been discussed amongst philosophers purely as a male ideal. And she transfers this idealism to a relationship of passion between a man and a woman … and I really think that she is the first [woman] that we have on record of so clearly doing so.”
There was sex (“We were joined as one, first in the house and then in spirit,” says Abelard), philosophical discussion about the nature of love and friendship, theological debate about the Holy Trinity and bringing rationality to the understanding of God.
There was also song – Abelard is, with Hildegard of Bingen, the foremost composer of the 12th century and some of his compositions survive in the Carmina Burana, now mostly known for Carl Orff’s interpretation.
And one can hear the undisguised delight of this young woman as she tells her older lover that “when you sought me out for foul pleasures … you placed Heloise through frequent song on the lips of -everyone; every marketplace, every house echoed my name”.
She spurned Abelard’s offer of marriage: “I tried to persuade you away from marriage and an ill-starred union, but you kept quiet over much of what I said about preferring love to marriage, freedom to chains. As God is my witness, if Augustus, ruler of the whole world, deigned to honour me with marriage and conferred on me the whole world to possess forever, it would seem worthier to me to be called your prostitute than his empress.”
Or in another letter, “The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding … but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.”
No wonder the Italian poet Petrarch, who idolised women, could not read her letters (prior to Mews’s discovery, only three from her to Abelard survived) without exclamatory annotations in the margins.
Even today, Heloise has the ability to shock in her unrepentant rejection of social mores, renunciation of morality, and belief in the primacy of sexual and spiritual love and its integration with her religion.
It ended very badly.
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