The neo-Gothic tomb, with its effigies of the couple reclining peacefully, is a picturesque stone monument to love’s persistence. For that reason, it became something of a pilgrimage site in the 19th century. The writer Mark Twain rolled his eyes at the crowds of “memento-cabbaging vandals” who travelled to the tomb from all over France “to weep and wail and ‘grit’ their teeth over their heavy sorrows” and hope for beyond-the-grave intervention in their own unhappy love lives.
The story that draws so many visitors even today is a tale of a doomed clandestine medieval romance – that of Abélard, the rising academic star who fell for his most gifted student, Héloïse. It involves a forbidden love, a hidden pregnancy, a secret marriage, an escape in the guise of a nun, a castration, and a lengthy and final separation. If that precis reads like the plot of a television melodrama miniseries, it seemed no less sensational to people in the Middle Ages.
The story has captured the imaginations and empathy of countless people over the centuries, and been retold and depicted in numerous works of art and literature. But how accurately do these portrayals reflect the experiences of the historical Héloïse and Abélard? Was their relationship really a timeless love story – or has the reality become obscured by simplified myth-making?
Affair of the heart
Paris in the early 12th century was a vibrant, burgeoning place. Its streets were thronged with merchants and craftspeople, redolent with the aromas of fresh-baked bread, horse manure and woodsmoke, and lined by parish churches, shopfronts and a steadily increasing number of half-timbered houses.
At its heart lay the small island known as the Île de la Cité. Here Héloïse spent much of her adolescence living in her uncle Fulbert’s household. He was part of the community of canons who served the basilica of Saint-Étienne, the now-vanished precursor to the cathedral of Notre-Dame.
Héloïse was highly intelligent, mastering not only Latin but also Greek and Hebrew – rare accomplishments for anyone in western Europe then, let alone a woman. A man with Héloïse’s intellectual talents would have easily gained admission to the renowned cathedral school of Paris. However, the only way for a woman to acquire a higher-level education in that period was to employ a private tutor, so around 1115 or slightly later – when Héloïse was in her mid-teens – Fulbert hired the charismatic cleric Pierre Abélard to be her tutor.
Born in 1079, Abélard was the eldest son of a minor noble family in Brittany, but had renounced his inheritance to pursue life as a scholar. During his career, he acquired a reputation for both brilliance and arrogance, thanks to challenging, unconventional writings such as his Theologia, Sic et Non (Yes and No) and Scito te Ipsum (Know Yourself).
Having heard tell of Héloïse’s beauty and intelligence, Abélard decided – before he had even met her – that “she was the one to bring to [his] bed”. He was not given to praising others’ intelligence lightly, but he wrote that “for her wealth in letters, she was supreme” and that her intellect “made her highly praised throughout the entire realm”.
Despite their age gap – roughly two decades – and the fact that he was her teacher, they quickly entered into a sexual relationship. They tried their best to keep this a secret but, once Héloïse became pregnant, that was no longer possible. She slipped out of the city disguised as a nun, and travelled to stay with Abélard’s family in Brittany. There she gave birth to a son, giving him the distinctive name Astrolabe, and the pair married in secret.
Héloïse then hid at the convent of Argenteuil, just a little north-west of Paris, hoping to avoid her uncle’s anger at her behaviour – which was considered incredibly scandalous at the time. This plan backfired spectacularly. Héloïse’s relatives assumed that she had gone to the convent because Abélard had abandoned her, unmarried – and took their revenge at that perceived outrage by having Abélard attacked and castrated.
This shocking outburst of violence had a number of consequences. With Abélard’s marriage now public knowledge at a time when the church was increasingly enforcing the requirement for clerical celibacy, he knew that he would not be able to continue his chosen career. His reputation, already precarious, was badly damaged. His former teacher Roscelin of Compiègne called Abélard “contemptuous” and guilty of “the filthiest violation of virginal modesty”.
Héloïse’s relatives assumed that Abélard had abandoned her – and took their revenge by having him attacked and castrated
The couple could not now remedy the situation by setting up a household together. Following the brutal attack and his castration, Abélard was no longer able to perform the act that was thought in the Middle Ages to be one of the defining aspects of a husband’s marital role. He later wrote that he “felt the shame more than the dismemberment” and “fell into such a state of despair that I thought of quitting the realm of Christendom and going over to the heathen” – a strong statement indeed from a devout Christian. In the event, Abélard became a monk at the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, and urged Héloïse to take the veil herself.
She was initially reluctant to do so, feeling “no calling for the monastic profession, nor any religious devotion”, but she was unshakeably loyal to her husband and eventually gave in. She joined the Benedictine monastery at Argenteuil before moving to the Abbey of the Paraclete in Ferreux-Quincey, about 60 miles south-east of Paris. There she served as abbess and, according to the Paraclete’s surviving sources, was a capable administrator who ensured that the establishment stayed on a firm financial and reputational footing. This was despite the fact that Héloïse never developed any sense of religious calling, and felt that she would receive no heavenly reward for her labours at the Paraclete because “it is certain that I have done nothing as yet for love of [God]”.
After the exposure of his affair with Héloïse, Abélard retreated into religious life – but not from intellectual debate. He continued to quarrel with figures such as Bernard of Clairvaux, possibly the most influential theologian of the era, and his work was twice condemned as heretical by church councils. He was so unpopular in his role as the abbot of the monastery of St-Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany that he had to flee following an attempt on his life. He moved to the great monastery of Cluny in Burgundy and then finally retired, by then a sick, elderly man, to the priory of St Marcel, near Chalon-sur-Saône, where he died in 1142.
His remains were taken discreetly to the Abbey of the Paraclete where Héloïse was abbess; on her death in 1164, she was interred alongside him. Their remains were reputedly transferred to Père Lachaise in 1817, though some dispute whether the bones of either of them actually lie there.
Love letters
Even while separated by their monastic vows and living many miles apart, Abélard and Héloïse kept in touch. In the 1130s, Abélard wrote a kind of memoir, the Historia Calamitatum (History of Misfortunes), which provides an intimate portrait of his life and their story. After reading this text, Héloïse initiated an exchange of letters with Abélard that reveal the complexity and challenges of their relationship.
These missives document Héloïse’s continued desire for Abélard, in language that seems startling when used by a consecrated nun. People looking at her mode of dress and way of life might think her chaste, she wrote, but “they do not know the hypocrite I am”. Héloïse stated that, even when attending Mass, “lewd visions” of the sex she had enjoyed with Abélard “take such a hold on my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers”.
Such passages have captured countless readers’ imaginations and empathy over the centuries, beginning almost immediately. The 12th-century historian Otto of Freising alludes to Abélard’s castration in his Deeds of Barbarossa, so the story must have made it at least as far as Germany.
The lovers’ fame waxed and waned through the later Middle Ages; they weren’t mentioned in Dante’s c1321 discussion of sinful lovers, but Chaucer included a passing reference to Héloïse in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in the Canterbury Tales (written 1387–1400). His near contemporary Petrarch appears to have owned, read and annotated a copy of the couple’s letters and Abélard’s Historia Calamitatum.
Resurgent fascination
The popularity of their story then surged again in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1717, English poet Alexander Pope published Eloisa to Abelard, recounting the story from Héloïse’s perspective. That poem’s passionate emotions – in it, Héloïse declares herself “the slave of love and man” – struck a chord with the reading public, and it was translated into several languages.
The French painter Bernard d’Agesci’s Lady Reading the Letters of Heloise and Abelard (c1780) shows a young woman swooning, breasts part-bared, at the romance of that correspondence. D’Agesci’s Swiss contemporary Angelica Kauffmann painted the moment of the ill-fated couple’s parting, both dressed rather anachronistically in the height of Renaissance fashion. And the tale continues to inspire creators today: Héloïse and Abélard are referenced in an episode of The Sopranos, and appear as lustful marionettes in the 1999 film Being John Malkovich.
Today, a quick online search yields references to their tale being “one of history’s most passionate and romantic true love stories” and one of the “top 10 most torrid love affairs ever” – a “high-stakes romance” full of “grandeur”.
But should we have reservations about this kind of framing? We should certainly be wary about presenting the story as a simple romance. Rather, it’s a complex tale that raises many questions about how different kinds of relationships – romantic, sexual, familial, intellectual – worked in the Middle Ages.
It is true that most people who have been in love might empathise with Abélard’s description of how, when alone with Héloïse, “more words of love than of our reading passed between us, and more kissing than ideas”. He relished each moment he spent with her, and was irritated by every duty that took him away from her.
But most people would surely struggle to understand how such a lover could, as he professed, sometimes beat Héloïse so that no one would suspect him of being attracted to her. He later wrote that his “blows were the marks not of anger but of the tender affection that is sweeter than any perfume”.
Medieval European attitudes to relationships were in many ways quite different to those held today. There was no legal concept of domestic violence or spousal rape, and it is possible that no contemporary batted an eye at Abélard’s description of beating his future wife until she was visibly bruised – not even Héloïse herself. She does not seem to have viewed the relationship as abusive, even after years had passed and she was a powerful abbess with social standing of her own.
We do Héloïse a disservice if we see her only as a passive victim; her intelligence and leadership abilities make her a significant historical figure in her own right. She never claimed to be a feminist role model – she only ever claimed to be a woman in love.
Equally, we cannot ignore that Héloïse was raised in a society that encouraged her to think of women as subservient, just as Abélard was raised in one that shrugged at the beating of women. Look at the language she uses in her letters to Abélard: he is her husband, her father, her master; she is his wife, his daughter, his slave. In one famous punning line, she writes that she would rather be his whore (meretrix) than an empress (imperatrix). (Abélard, in contrast, staidly addresses his letters to his “dearly beloved sister in Christ”.)
Troubling tension
There is an unavoidable tension inherent in telling this story in the 21st century. From one angle, Héloïse is a woman who defies societal convention for the man she loves. She writes that she prefers “love to wedlock and freedom to chains” – a very uncommon assertion from a woman in the 12th century. She rejects the idea that their relationship was sinful. “Wholly guilty though I am,”she writes, “I am also… wholly innocent” because “it is not the deed but the intention of the doer which makes the crime.”
Héloïse compares marriage to sex work, and says that any woman who marries for economic security “would be ready to prostitute herself to a richer man, if she could”. In some ways, she sounds more like the second-wave feminists of the 1960s than her contemporaries. Should we praise the couple’s relationship as a testament to how people can choose love, affection and passion in a society not structured to allow for it?
Seen from another angle, though, Héloïse continually defined herself in relationship to Abélard and his wants, and always put herself in the lesser position. If a friend today told us that their partner alone had “the power to make me sad, to bring me happiness or comfort”, or said that they were “the sole possessor of my body and my will alike”, might we find such attitudes unhealthily codependent?
In some ways, Héloïse sounds more like the second-wave feminists of the 1960s than her contemporaries
Let us return to Père Lachaise for one last glimpse at Abélard and Héloïse’s monument with these issues in mind. In an earlier age, devotees sought mementoes more intimate and more grotesque than the modern celebrity autograph or selfie. Alexandre Lenoir, the archaeologist who spearheaded the removal of the couple’s remains to Paris in the 1810s, was happy to parcel out fragments of their skeletons to those whose favour he sought. One was given part of Abélard’s jaw; another received a tooth and a finger from Héloïse’s skeleton. There has always been an appetite for a piece of the past, especially of the doomed-but-devoted-love variety.
Perhaps today, though, admirers of these star-crossed lovers might be willing to take something less tangible but more important: an understanding that history teaches us the enduring complexity of human relationships and the paradoxical nature of love.
Yvonne Seale is associate professor of history at the State University of New York at Geneseo.
This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
