Babette Hellemans

Abelard and Heloise between Voice and Silence

This chapter studies both the letters of Heloise and Abelard and elements of their still-controversial reception. Its aim is to consider voice and silence as types or expressions of rhetorical individuality. I begin with a stance against what I see as a persistent idea about the famous letters exchanged between Abelard and Heloise: namely, that they are actually true letters, written between a couple in a consecutive order and revealing to the reader a sense of growing insight into their existence, both as a couple and as two individuals. My approach in this chapter draws on certain aspects of the debate that surrounds these letters in European scholarly tradition, and especially in Germany, where the tendency is arguably to emphasize the historical context of a source, as opposed to what might be described as the more politically engaged, gender-focused scholarship predominant in North America.1 My aim on these pages is a modest one, namely, to consider a particular historiographical approach to a body of commonly discussed sources.

Abelard’s Rib. dialectics of a twelfth-century monastic marriage and the historical epistemology of spirituality

This article proposes to describe the oxymoronic aspect of twelfth-century ascetic life, as it is couched in the semantics of marital ‘love-talk.’ By extending Christian asceticism to the field of marital semantics, I hope to come closer to a more intellectual kind of spirituality, situated in the philosophical discourse of the ars dialectica. While it is commonplace to state that affective speech in the twelfth century is a constitutive element of Western ‘spirituality’—up to the point that this period is sometimes credited with being the founder of an individual love-talk—the nature of a ‘matrimonial’ love-speech firmly located within monastic walls is far from self-evident. Furthermore, there is the issue of physical desire in both Christian worship (hymns, liturgy) and reflective, religious language. This ‘incarnation’ of love inside the history of Christianity was coined by the twelfth-century reformer and intellectual Bernard of Clairvaux in the most tangible terms possible, especially in his Sermons on the Song of Songs and in his devotional texts on Mary. However, it is not a broad claim with regard to the status of ‘spirituality’ within history that dominates the present article. If anything, this contribution could be characterized as exploring the opposite of the common semantics of spirituality: the argumentative and dialectical speech on the one hand and the fragility of poetry on the other, glooming beneath the surface of a meandering Christian tradition. My analysis of the work of Peter Abelard (1079–1142)—a fierce opponent of Bernard—will demonstrate a rather radical view of ‘spirituality’ as a sometimes veiled (integementum) and sometimes shattered specimen of medieval love-talk.