the documents of the Paraclete show that the real abbess "musthave been an outstanding person."

Friend, what do you wish fromme? I contain all that ever was, is, and shall be; I am totally fulfilled. Take ofme whatever you please. And if you wish all of me, I will never refuse

And Iloved myself so much along with him that I could not be contented at all. . . .

Her self-abasement is thus also a self-enrichment, a multiple en-hancement and proliferation of the roles that constitute her feminine self

(and perhapserotic)

Whatever the role sheplayed, Abelard was always her solus, her unicus, he alone could grieve her,comfort her, instruct her, command her, destroy her, or save her.

as we know, interrupted by potent distrac-tions.

But ifHeloise's letters are genuine, we cannot exclude either persona, nor can wedivide her career neatly into an "Ovidian phase" and a "Jeromian phase."

How unseemly for those holy hands which nowturn the pages of sacred books to have to perform degrading services inwomen's concerns!

les livres and les meurs feminins

a goodwoman who undermines his own case for the perfidy of all wives

She is allowed to speak authentically "on the passions ofwomen," but only in the safe space between two contrasting structures ofmale authority, one created by her husband's brutality and the other by thepoet's irony.

It would be hard to find another twelfth-or thirteenth-century author who belongs in that company, for dramaticmonologue was not a genre much cultivated at the time.

The lament heutters over his castration contains no mention of her, or even of regret fortheir lost pleasures, nor does he betray any sense that he sinned in makingher take the veil.

Monk and eunuch that he is, he makeshis mistress of fourteen years ago delight in calling herself his whore

What demon, then, could have possessed Abelard to forge let-ters so compromising that they would jeopardize his own new foundation,which had begun to display such promise, by fueling the very rumors hedeplored? In what demented frenzy would he defile the hitherto spotlessreputation of Heloise as abbess, violating the honor of his "beloved sisterin Christ" more grievously than he had done when he seduced her?

he seduced her

In her thirty-five-year reign, however, Heloisenot only won the personal esteem that is so well attested, but attractedenough gifts and vocations to the Paraclete to attach five new priories andan abbey, La Pommeraye.

With Robertson, let us imagine that she"devoted herself energetically, with only occasional uncomfortable lapses,to the settled routine of her new career."61 With Muckle, let us assume thatHeloise was inwardly all that she appeared to be outwardly: "a person ofsincerity, zeal and holiness and not a self-confessed hypocrite whose hearthas all the while been possessed of a spirit of sensuality."62 Let us recall theexemplary abbess whose virtue, as Peter the Venerable wrote, crushed thehead of the serpent and made "a laughing-stock of the proud prince ofthe world."

Heloise's theme of ex-clusive mutual belonging

For, surprisingly, none ofthe usual grounds for contesting authenticity is in fact present in this case.Nothing in the letters contradicts any documented historical fact, and al-leged internal discrepancies have all been satisfactorily explained

But two decades of argu-ment over grammatical constructions, alleged anachronisms, and minutepoints of monastic observance have yielded no more consensus than theprevious decades of argument over what Heloise or Abelard might haveplausibly thought or felt

Benton states that convincing arguments must be based on"the most technical and indeed unemotional issues," such as dating, cursuspatterns, and computer-assisted word counts.35 Psychological realism, hesays, is a "risky basis" for any claims of authenticity.

It may be that at least some twelfth-century audiences were less fastidious in these matters than their moderninterpreters

Abelard states that he was first attracted to herbecause "in the extent of her learning she was supreme" and had alreadybecome famous throughout the realm

According to Silvestre's fantasy, the forger had personally seduced andabandoned "a little Jeannic" who was demanding marriage, so in order toshake her off, he inserted Heloise's diatribe against matrimony in the His-toria. But this little Jeannie is assumed—unlike Heloise!—to be capableof following a complex argument in Latin and objecting that her seducerwas no eunuch, so had no excuse not to marry her. Therefore the forgermade his fictional Abelard downplay the effects of his castration

The abbotmay in fact have wanted to write a rule for nuns; but the idea that a womanwould not ask a man for anything he did not already want to give her iswishful thinking of a high degree. And the odd claim that Heloise con-sulted with Abelard about personal letters that he then wrote in her namerests on nothing more substantial than a sense that women did not write

Robert-son's Hcloise, whatever her status—the seductive and silly little minx, theproper but silent abbess, or even the hypothetical bourgeois wife—is welland truly repressed.

Embodying all the negative stereotypes ofthe feminine, Robertson's Heloise is both minx and shrew

Robertson's conde-scension toward Heloise is blatant. He refers to her twice as "poor Heloise"and once even as "little Heloisc"; at least half a dozen times, he calls herdiscourse on marriage in thcHistoria calamitatum a "little sermon."

One may perhaps be pardoned for asking if this preoccupation withputting women in their place, establishing male control, and giving a manthe final say is exclusively Abelard's.

"set [Heloise] right"

Because Muckle doesnot perceive such "chiding," he tentatively concludes that Abelard couldnot have seen the offending passages, and he doubts that such an esteemedabbess could have written them.

Now women are used to being minor, if not exactly trivial

oth Heloise and Abelard, Iwill argue, arc more historically as well as psychologically plausible figuresif we accept the least problematic hypothesis about them, namely that theletters we have are essentially theirs.

First, Iwill try to dispatch once for all the old hypothesis that Abelard forged theletters of Heloise as part of a literary fiction. Then, after concluding thisfervent but no doubt futile attempt, I will show how the same questionsthat have vexed the scholarly debate over Heloise—questions of authority,authenticity, and repression of the female voice—are precisely the ques-tions that most vexed Heloise herself in her pious and amorous wars withAbelard.