From: Heloise@hotmail.com To: P.Abelard@gmail.com Re: I Luv U

I’ve been re-reading this week the Letters of Heloise and Abelard. Revision is the main motivation behind this, as Peter Abelard was a controversial twelfth-century theologian twice accused and put on trial for heresy. However I’m also intrigued by this rare personal story. History can be considered ‘dry as dust’ or concerned only with people dead and buried. Well perhaps that is true. But it ought to be remembered that those people who are dead and buried, were once living and breathing the same as you and I. The world they lived in may have been different, but their aspirations and dreams, love and lust, laughter and tears were not so very different to our own.
     Heloise was an uncommonly bright young woman who had an affair with her teacher Abelard. They had a child and were married secretly. However on discovery of this Heloise’s family were enraged. Heloise was taken to a nunnery, and Abelard was castrated and sent to a monastery. Despite this the two lovers continued to communicate to each other through letters.

     I wish to quote from several of Heloise’s letters to Abelard, (from the most recent Penguin translation), to show how sentiments of love and lust in particular have gone unchanging. You can almost imagine, with a few shortened words, incorrect spellings and grammar mistakes, this as a text message or a post on Abelard’s Facebook page.

Tell me one thing, if you can. Why, after our entry into religion, which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you that I have neither a word from you when you are here to give me strength nor the consolation of a letter in absence? Tell me, I say, if you can – or I will tell you what I think and indeed everyone suspects. It was desire, not affection which bound you to me, the flame of lust rather than love. So when the end came to what you desired, any show of feeling you used to make went with it. This is not merely my own opinion, beloved, it is everyone’s. There is nothing personal or private about it; it is the general view which is widely held. I only wish that it were mine alone, and that the love you professed could find someone to defend it and so comfort me in my grief for a while. I wish I could think of some explanation which would excuse you and somehow cover up the way you hold me cheap.

In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we shared have been too sweet – they cannot displease me, and can scarcely shift from my memory. Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep. Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purer, lewd visions of those pleasures take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost. Everything we did and also the times and places where we did it are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live them all again with you.

     As I sit here reading through these letters, it occurs to me how little has really changed through history. Kings, war heroes and great inventors may come and go, but human emotions remain constant. Having suffered from a broken heart, and during these consecutive days of revision convinced that I might be locked in a nun’s cell, I feel now almost a sisterly bond with Heloise, regardless of the 900 year age gap.