Professor Jane schulenburg

Professor Jane T. Schulenburg is an expert on medieval women’s history and author of Forgetful of Their SexForgetful of Their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500-1100.
Published in 1998 by the University of Chicago Press, 595 p., (Learn more)
ISBN: 978-0-226-74054-6

 

 



ECRIVAINES FRANCAISES ET FRANCOPHONES
French and Francophone Women Writers

Week 1

"Heloise and Romantic Love"

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Emily AuerbachNorman GillilandThe program for this week is from a series on medieval women produced by Wisconsin Public Radio’s University of the Air. Listen as hosts Emily Auerbach (UW-Madison Professor of English) and Norman Gilliland (Wisconsin Public Radio) interview Professor Schulenburg about Heloise.


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Norman Gilliland: Is she able to move beyond this relationship with Abelard?

Jane SchulenburgProf. Schulenburg: In the second letter actually we see Heloise's despair continuing and that she still is very much in love with Abelard. She writes urgently of her sexual frustration. She cannot forget their happiness as lovers.
Emily: She writes, "Of all wretched women I am the most wretched, and amongst the unhappy I am unhappiest. The higher I was exalted when you preferred me to all other women the greater my suffering over my own fall and yours when I was flung down for the higher the ascent the heavier the fall. I yielded long before to the pleasures of carnal desires and merited then what I weep for now."

Norman GillilandNorman Gilliland: I am trying to determine if there is any kind of remorse or guilt in Heloise as she looks back on this passionate relationship.

Prof. Schulenburg: As she wrote, she was feeling early on that her ascent to the marriage would only lead to problems in their life. She never forgave herself for allowing them to get married. She also had this terrible dilemma of taking vows for Abelard. She was pushed into the monastery by Abelard, and she did not take the vows for God.

The guilt was this problem of her life of hypocrisy. On the outside, again, she was an ideal nun. She was an ideal abbess. She was the exemplum of piety, but she along with Abelard and others in the 12th century believed in what is called the Doctrine of Intention, and it is what is inside that really counts, her intention, her motives. She was living, she believed, she was living a lie.

She looks then in this correspondence in her life for a reward from Abelard because she had done everything for Abelard, and he, of course, denied it to her. She could not expect anything from God because she has denied God, and she cannot repent.

So, she is asking Abelard in this correspondence for help in this great suffering that she is involved in, this passion. This intensity of feeling here, again, has been stoically concealed for all of these years. She is intellectually able to analyze her problem, but she needs help from Abelard since she has given all of her love to Abelard and not to God.

Norman Gilliland: What kind of help does she expect?

Jane SchulenburgProf. Schulenburg: Well, she wants Abelard to bail her out in some way here. Abelard simply with his letters, he responds with a monastic answer as a spiritual counselor but no longer as her lover. He does not give her the support that she is searching for. It is interesting after this letter Abelard's responds to her, and he says in a way that everything that happened was for the best. He tries to make Heloise see how their sins require divine punishment. Both are now, he said, free from the ties of the flesh which formed, of course, the barrier to divine love. Heloise, then, he tells her, should substitute or transfer her love for him to Christ so she can become a bride of Christ.

Norman Gilliland: I was going to ask about that. Does she succeed ever in transferring that intensity of hers to the religious cause?

Prof. Schulenburg: We can see, perhaps, a turning point in Heloise's attitude, certainly a change in the tone of her correspondence. She no longer in the third letter asks for Abelard's love or understanding, and she turns then to constructive things and asks Abelard, first of all, about the origins of the female orders. She is turning to business, or practical activities, and then she asks him specifically for a regular, a rule, which would be suitable for her nuns.

The correspondence abruptly changes from the personal where she is asking for his help, where she is asking for his reassurance and his love which he really denies her. Now, they correspond as abbess to abbot.

Norman Gilliland: She has made her mind up. It is a sudden decision here that she is not going to find the kind of support she wanted from Abelard, so she is willing to be just strictly business from this point on.

Prof. Schulenburg: Right.

Emily AuerbachEmily Auerbach: Here is a sample of that more businesslike tone she uses in a later letter to Abelard, "And so all we handmaids of Christ who are your daughters in Christ come as suppliants to demand of your paternal interest two things which we see to be very necessary for ourselves. One is that you will teach us how the order of nuns began and what authority there is for our profession. The other that you will prescribe some rule for us and write it down, a rule which shall be suitable for women and also describe fully the manner and habit of our way of life which we find was never done by the Holy Fathers."

Prof. Schulenburg: For the majority of her life, for 40 years actually, she spends in a monastery. She was ultimately made abbess of her house at Argenteuil, and she was very successful. Heloise was very well connected with bishops and the nobility and so forth, and she became a very successful abbess of the Paraclete, and she was revered for her learning and her sanctity.

The Paraclete then, this monastery of Heloise, became very wealthy, and it was one of the most distinguished female houses in France, but as abbess Heloise corresponded with the greats, with the pope. She corresponded with the abbot of Cluny, and she was an extremely successful administrator. They owned extensive lands and this monastery and extended properties, and they ultimately had six daughter houses that were founded from the Paracletes. This was a very strong, very important monastery, the Paraclete.

Norman GillilandNorman Gilliland: So she had a 40-year career as an abbess and yet still that career is overshadowed by this relationship with Abelard. Was there any kind of a postscript to that when she died? Was she still linked with Abelard in people's minds?

Prof. Schulenburg: When Abelard died and his body was fought over as to where it was going to be buried, secretly under cover of darkness it was brought to the Paraclete, to Heloise's monastery and he was buried there.

Heloise then died some 21 years later. Heloise was buried alongside of Abelard in the abbey church. There is no record in the sources of her body being put into Abelard's tomb, but romantics said that her body was placed in his tomb and he opened up his bony arms to her. Keeping in tradition with the history of the relationship, it was more likely, obviously, that she would have opened hers to him.

The tombs then were moved several times at the Paraclete, and then it is in 1817 that Abelard and Heloise's tombs were brought to the new cemetery, Père Lachaise, in Paris in a way of promoting this place. Flowers are still sometimes placed beside their effigies by those who know something of their history or by Parisians on All Soul's Day.

Norman Gilliland: We have seen these really complex insights into Heloise, a composite portrait at best, I guess I'd have to say, but if you were to pick an image, a portrait, of Heloise that seems to summarize her, what would it be?

Prof. Schulenburg: Perhaps, the most poetic would be Jean De Meun's Romance of the Rose. He has only praise for Heloise, the learned nun.

Emily AuerbachEmily Auerbach: Jean De Meun writes, "She was a wise, well educated maid, well loved and loving, yet with arguments she taught her lover wedlock to avoid. Her letters pointed out how hard her found circumstances of a wedded life, no matter how discreet the wife may be. Not only had she read and studied books but learned of woman's nature in herself.

That he should love her, she made her demand but also that he'd claim no other right than what was granted freely, of good grace, without supremacy or mastership. That he might study freely without tie though hers while she and science not unheard pursued her studies, too, but by my soul I scarcely can believe that such another woman ever lived. It was her education, I suppose, that taught her how she could best hold in and curb her woman's nature, and if Abelard had trusted her he had not come to grief."
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