Abelard and Heloise - Medieval Imagination - Oakland Campus

Course Texts on Reserve

Listening to Heloise by Bonnie Wheeler (Editor)
Call Number: BX4705 H463 L57 2000
ISBN: 0312213549
Publication Date: 2000
Heloise, the twelfth-century French abbess and reformer, emerges from this book as one of history's most extraordinary women, a thinker-writer of profound insight and skill. Her learned mind attracted the most radical philosopher of her time, Peter Abelard. He became her teacher, lover, husband, and finally monastic ally. That relationship has made her fame until now. But Heloise is far more important in her own right. Seventeen experts of international standing collaborate here to reveal and analyze how Heloise's daring achievements shaped normative issues of theology, rhetoric, rational argument, gender, and emotional authenticity. At last we are able to see her for herself, in her moment of history and human awareness.

Literary Criticism about Abelard and Heloise

Baswell, Christopher. "Heloise." The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing. Ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace. Cambridge University Press, 2003. PN682 W6 C36 2003
Performs close readings of the letters revealing Heloise's agency and the echoing imagery and patterns that Abelard and Heloise send back and forth to one another, imagery that is one of the great expressions of private emotion of the Middle Ages.
Irvine, Martin. "Abelard and (Re) Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculinization. Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Bonnie Wheeler, Eds. New York and London: Garland, 1997/ HQ1088 B43 1997.
Argues that Abelard was engaged in a project of re-establishing his masculinity in response to his public identity as a feminized eunuch and, even moreso, in response to the burning of his book.
Wheeler, Bonnie. "Originary Fantasies: Abelard's Castration and Confession."Becoming Male in the Middle Ages. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome and Bonnie Wheeler, Eds. New York and London: Garland, 1997/ HQ1088 B43 1997
Argues that Abelard sustains his intellectual potency via the castration of his testicles. Looks at common castration practices and the medieval medical treatises on the relationship between semen and the brain.
Jones, Nancy A. "By Woman's Tears Redeemed: Female Lament in St. Augusting's Confessions and the Correspondence of Abelard and Heloise." Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts. Eds. Barbara K. Gold, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter. Albany
Argues that Abelard draws on heroic models in classical literature to portray himself as worthy of lament, and he responds to Heloise in order to further this agenda rather than recognize the specificity of her anguish.
Newman, Barbara. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature. Philadlphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1995. By639 W7 N48 1995
Argues against those who try to assign authorship for all the letter s to Abelard by arguing what Heloise's agenda and point of view are. Interesting historical tidbits about Heloise's life.
Katharina Wilson and Glenda McLeod, "Textual Strategies in the Abelard and Heloise Correspondence."Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth Century Woman. Wheeler, Bonnie, Ed. London, MacMillan Press, 2000. BX4705 H463 L57 2000
Argues that Heloise wins the rhetorical debate across the letters by invoking a traditional, abject female identify that makes Abelard's self-representations appear selfish and hubristic. Dwells on the crises of marriage and abandonment adsw well as the sexual longing that Heloise contrasts with Abelard's crises in his opening letter.
Linda Georgianna, "In Any Corner of Heaven: Heloise's Critique of Monastic Life." Wheeler, Bonnie, Ed. London, MacMillan Press, 2000. BX4705 H463 L57 2000
Argues that Heloise's radical reform agenda (in Letter 6) for female monastic life anticipates Protestant reforms of the future. What begins as a request for specific minor changes in existing monastic rule becomes a broad argument, on the part of Heloise, questioning the whole enterprise of regulating the interior spiritual life by means of external bodily rules. Georgianna urges that Letter 6 is not a break in Heloise's series of letters for this reason: Though Heloise has stopped discussing her marriage and sexual longing for Abelard, she continues to dwell on the female body, raising issues of menstruation and etc. She never stops confronting Abelard with the reality of the female body.
Alcuin Blamires, "No Outlet for Incontinence: Heloise and the Question of Consolation." (Incontinence here means inability to repress sexual desire,) Wheeler, Bonnie, Ed. London, MacMillan Press, 2000. BX4705 H463 L57 2000

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Medieval Imagination - Oakland Campus: Abelard and Heloise

Course Texts on Reserve

Literary Criticism about Abelard and Heloise