Speculum Spotlight: The Marriage of a Cleric & Canon in Twelfth-Century Paris: Heloise, Abelard, and the Evolution of Clerical Celibacy

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In this episode, producer Loren Cantrell chats with Stanford professor Fiona Griffiths about her latest contribution to Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, in which Griffiths revisits the famously complex relationship between Heloise and Abelard. Griffiths situates Heloise’s striking language within the shifting landscape of 12th-century debates on clerical marriage and reform, offering a powerful reinterpretation of one of the Middle Ages’ most challenging couples.

Fiona Griffiths is Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor of Humanities at Stanford University as well as a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. A historian of medieval Western Europe, Griffiths focuses on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her work explores the possibilities for social experimentation and cultural production inherent in medieval religious reform movements, addressing questions of gender, spirituality, and authority, particularly as they pertain to the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives).

Loren Cantrell is a series producer for The Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast and a PhD candidate in the Department of French at the University of Virginia.

Episode transcript (Note: For a time-dynamic transcript, access the episode through a free podcast platform such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify):

Barbara: Hi there. I'm Barbara Newman, the editor of Speculum, a Journal of Medieval Studies. Welcome to Speculum Spotlight, our quarterly podcast in collaboration with the Multicultural Middle Ages podcast. Each episode takes you behind the scenes of an article in our current issue. This month, we feature Professor Fiona Griffiths from Stanford University, speaking about her article on the marriage of a cleric and canon in 12th century Paris, Heloise Abelard and the evolution of clerical celibacy. The famous couple has been considered from many perspectives, but today, Professor Griffiths looks at Abelard in the light of shifting canon law about clerical marriage in the context of the Gregorian reform movement. The host and producer of this episode is Loren Cantrell.

Loren: just in case our, our audience is unfamiliar with this really remarkable story, the, the, historic mythical even we could almost say, uh, love story of Heloise and Abelard.

I wondered if in your own words, you could kick us off by giving your own, um, narrative account of, of their story, of their relationship and, and kind of highlight certain elements that you think are really, worth refocusing on.

Fiona: well, I guess the first thing to say about the narrative is that in our understanding of kind of the sequence of the relationship between Heloise and Abelard, we tend to just refer to, Abelard's account of his life, the Historia Calamitatum as it's known. And this appears in the collection usually as as letter one.

And, um, and we. We draw the sequence of events from that. And, and the first thing to say is that this is obviously not a kind of unfiltered personal, you know, truth telling endeavor. This is a highly structured rhetorical, um, literary text. in fact, recent scholarship has demonstrated, and I'm thinking of David Luscombe Constant Mews, um, and Wim Verbaal, they've shown us that this is not a straightforward story, that it's rhetorically constructed literary text, And so we shouldn't forget when we're looking at that text that this is what Abelard wants to tell us it's not everything. Um, there are things that he withholds. There are things that he emphasizes and some of the things that he withholds we'd really like to know. and he doesn't tell us. but nevertheless, we do have to look to him and, and obviously to some contextual accounts as well. Um, but largely to him to understand the story of their relationship and how they met. and then how the relationship unfolded, in those early years. So, uh, so that's the text that we tend to draw in. But, even from that text, here's the basic story.

So Heloise is a highly intelligent woman living in Paris, in the early part of the 12th century. And she had been educated at the monastery of Argenteuil, which is just north of the modern city of Paris. but by the time that we meet her, is living in the home of her Uncle Fulbert, who's a canon at the cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris. So she's living right in the heart of the city. And Abelard is also there too, because this is where the emerging university is based. He had been living in the city on and off since probably about 1100 and teaching in various different places, but by this time he's in and around the cathedral on the Île de la Cité so Abelard and Heloise are, are living. in the same place they, um, meet each other. Abelard tells us that he is, very taken with her, that she's very beautiful. He thinks about all of the things that would make for a good, uh, for want of a better word, a good relationship. And he decides that she is the one.

And, and so he sets about finagling his way into Fulbert's house so that he can live in close proximity to her. And the arrangement is that he will be her tutor and this is because she couldn't study at the university because of course the university was only open to men at that time.

So Abelard takes this position as her tutor and is living in Fulbert's house and describes how they begin to, um, fall in love, they begin to develop also a physical relationship. Fulbert discovers the relationship and, and tries to have them separated, but Heloise discovers that she is pregnant. and she exalts in this news.

She's very happy, delighted, Abelard sends her to his family in Brittany to await the birth of the child. And meanwhile, he arranges with Fulbert that he'll marry her. and he writes to Heloise, uh, to obviously to tell her this news. This is not a letter that we have. Um, but Heloise opposes it and she resists.

And this is the point that gets really. Interesting is that she lays out all of these arguments about why they should not marry, why she doesn't wanna marry. and she uses really powerful language in, in describing that. she in fact says that she would rather be Abelard's friend. The word friend is more palatable to her than wife.

And she says, or even prostitute, even concubine. nevertheless, despite her, uh, opposition, Abelard prevails. She comes back to the city after the birth of their son, Astralabe. And the two are married in not quite a secret marriage, but in sort of a, a, a small marriage, let's put it that way. So Fulbert is there, some friends are there, and they're married.

They receive a nuptial blessing in a church. And, um, and then they're, wanting to keep the marriage quiet, they wanna keep it secret. But Fulbert who'd agreed to that begins telling people that Heloise and Abelard are married and Heloise when she denies it, then becomes kind of an object of abuse for Fulbert.

Um, Abelard then, decides that he will move her from, Fulbert's house and puts her back in the monastery of Argenteuil where she had formally lived and been educated.

And at that point, Fulbert believing that Abelard's trying to put her away, um, make her into a nun, has him attacked in the night and castrated. And at this point, obviously the relationship is now dramatically changed and Abelard decides that he'll become a monk, um, which means he, insists that Heloise become a nun.

He in fact, makes her take the veil before he enters the monastery something that she later on, um, admits demonstrated that he didn't trust her and, and that, she resented. and this is really the point at which, We, see the, the early relationship end and we pick up again. in this point in the 1130s where Abelard is writing his account of his life, his history of his calamities, the Historia Calamitatum and he writes a letter, ostensibly to a friend laying out the whole sorry story of his life. Heloise reads it and responds, and then the two enter into a, letter writing relationship. So we have these two moments that we can see. Um, the first is the original relationship, in, in Paris, in the home of Fulbert and around the, uh, cathedral. And this is probably taking place in, um 1115 and 16 and 17, maybe we don't have firm dates. and then in the early 1130s when Abelard is writing, his account of what happened, and, and that's what we have. So we work from those, letters and those details. but we should always keep in mind that this is a constructed story. This is a story Abelard wants us to hear.

and I just wanna add maybe two things. First, that they definitely wrote letters back and forth during the relationship and these may survive in the so-called "Letters of Two Lovers", which have been written about extensively by Barbara Newman, Constant Mews and Steven Jaeger.

Um, secondly, Heloise used some really powerful language in her efforts to dissuade Abelard from marriage. And this is the point that my article picks up on because she professes to prefer the language of friend to wife. And she even says that she would've preferred to be, um, known as a concubine or even a whore.

and the last thing I wanna mention is that in all of this, Abelard was a church man when this was taking place. So we learned that he was a cleric and a canon. And it's really these last two points that caught my eye for this article.

Loren: Well, that's what I enjoyed so much about, uh, reading your piece is that you're really reframing the relationship in this very specific, particular way. And so I was wondering if you could talk a bit more now about the development of, of the piece, because in the piece you really reframe the nature of their marriage and their relationship and why it is Heloise would have so many objections to the relationship.

Fiona: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much. Um. Of course I've read the letters of Abelard and Heloise so many times. Uh, you know, I read it first when I was an undergraduate.

I actually wrote an undergraduate paper about it. Um, but it was really in the course of my recent work, writing about clerical marriage and particularly trying to think about clerical wives that coming back to the text just made me look at it with fresh eyes. In fact, I'd been invited to give a paper at a conference, in France.

And the, the, conference itself was about gender and law. And I kept on thinking, well, what could I offer? And at that point I was again, looking at the letters and some of Abelard's phrases where he's defending his care for Heloise. He's just really jumped out at me. As having more to do with clerical marriage than we've tended to think when we've talked about Abelard and Heloise.

And that, was really the thing that jumped out at me first was his way of defending himself from attacks on his care for In the years when they were both in monastery. So he's an abbot and she's an abbess, and he's spending a tremendous amount of time looking after her community and engaging with her intellectually and is attacked for that.

And he defends himself by saying that men who enter the religious life have an obligation to care for the wives that they'd be married to before they implicitly took religious orders. Implying there, that they take orders as a priest. Or, at this time potentially also a sub deacon. So that really jumped out at me because I thought, hold on a second.

What do we know about the sequence? What do we know about clerical marriage at this time? What do we know about what's happening in Paris? And and it was that moment that really started me thinking about the project. And then of course it went through various different iterations, and, That too. as I was thinking more and more about clerical marriage, I really. Became very struck by Heloise's language, which of course is striking to everybody. Um, that she'd rather be his, uh, whore, um, his friend, his concubine, um, than his wife. That kind of language too. Having worked on clerical marriage and particularly attacks on clerical wives, again just jumped out at me as being so powerful.

This is the language that's being used to demean clerical wives right from the middle of the 11th century, maybe even earlier. And and I think that we've just had a tendency to see this as a story that's kind of. You know, a celebrity romance. Um, we take it out of context often and we've tended to see Heloise's language as love language.

and that's very gendered, obviously. and I, I wanted to look back at that language and put it in historic context and say like, let's talk about Heloise in the early 12th century. What exactly is she drawing on when she uses this very charged language?

Loren: also here you were getting into talking about what do we know about the timeline of their relationship and the development of laws in this exact moment? And that's, that's one thing I found so interesting in your piece is that, um, the timeline is so tight here in terms of their relationship, their interaction.

And the evolution of, laws surrounding, uh, clerical marriage. So I, I wonder if you could even, drill in more into that, the, the tightness of the timeline. And I really, I feel like it gave a bit of even more excitement and edge to the story that they're really kind of like fighting against this, legal clock for lack of a better phrase.

Fiona: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so the, um. Pieces that I'd written previously. And in fact, part of my work on clerical marriage was actually launched in Speculum with an article I wrote about, um, a priest's wife in Bavaria in the middle of the 11th century, by the name of Froibirg.

And in her case, the challenge was really that we have so little direct information. So we have, a couple of documents, um, that mention her. And we have a book that she gave, um, to the monks of Benediktbeuern. And so as a matter in that case of trying to build out a broader context for this woman and, actually be able to write a history of her and place her also against kind of contemporary developments.

With Abelard and Heloise the story is so different because, particularly in the case of Abelard, he wrote so much and we can precisely date his writings and, and we can sort of lay those over chronology of what's happening in terms of ideas about clerical marriage. and again, the interesting thing about the fact that the Historia Calamitatum is written.

You know, quite a long time after the relationship is that we can also think about how his desire to present the story has changed over time. And part of that change over time may indeed have something to do with ideas about clerical marriage and, and sort of the developing, Opposition, which of course in terms of legal rulings is, um, is made, quite, definitive, with Lateran II in 1139.

So we can look at that kind of chronology and we can place. Heloise and Abelard in a context, and I think that really also jumped out at me as an opportunity that we don't often have in terms of trying to write about a clerical wife in particular, which is my interest is that we don't have much more than kind of a single data point, you know, a single charter at a single point in time.

And here we have a lifetime and we have letters that negotiate back and forth. and we can really plot those against what's happening in Paris, what's happening in northern France, what's happening in terms of, local councils and people legislation. And now we can actually put them in a conversation that they hadn't really been placed into, uh, in terms of scholarship, before, which is not to say people hadn't asked these sorts of questions, but laying out this broad, sort of chronological sweep of who they are in this particular place in time, really again, was an opportunity I didn't wanna let pass me by.

Loren: we have this sort of unique ability to place them chronologically, because we can date Abelard's, uh, Abelard's writings in this way.

I wonder if you could give us a more of a sense of what is the surviving evidence we have? personally, I'm such a, you know, manuscript studies nerd. I wo-wonder what sort of, um, materials that we have and then what sort of distancing effect maybe there is even from the copying of these materials, um, and how they come to us in the present day.

Fiona: Yeah. Yeah. So one of the, um, challenges for um, reading the letters certainly is that we don't have a contemporary manuscript. We don't obviously have an autograph manuscript, but we don't have a manuscript, which is 12th century. And our earliest manuscript of the letter is, is from the 1230s, probably.

Um, uh, which has a complete collection of all the letters put together, and that manuscript has been very helpful to scholars who have tried to understand the context of the letters, how they would've been read and received, and maybe even why they were put together in the first place. And this is obviously quite interesting 'cause for many of us, our first encounter with the letters is gonna be through, um, the Penguin translation.

You know, for me it was Betty Radice's, um, Penguin translation. And that translation, divided the letters. In two and, um, and presented sort of the first letters as, personal and the later letters as letters of direction. Suggesting that there wasn't really a connection between what Abelard and Heloise were writing about in the early letters and the fact that they're embedded in this monastic, context, and the manuscript evidence has.

Really demonstrated to us that we should read the letters the way they would've been read by, um, those who read that manuscript, for instance. And they're all together. They're certainly not divided, and they are presented in the context of other works that are, specifically relevant to women's religious lives, particularly Canon law.

So for instance, excerpts from the Panormia. so we can, we can see how people were reading these texts and they weren't reading them. As we've often tended to do as sort of a tragic love story, they were reading them as kind of a narrative of, monastic life and spiritual conversion.

Loren: Jumping back to something we brought up a, a moment ago in terms of the way that Heloise is often portrayed and, and also thinking about the language that she uses specifically to describe herself in relation to Abelard.

a lot of debate has been generated surrounding the, the relationship labels that they use So how is it that, we can read, into these various labels that Heloise argues, um, so ardently for throughout her letters and on into her later years and how these labels developed throughout her life. and even specifically, you mentioned the article, the ongoing debate around how we can best translate, her use of amica.

Is she lover, friend, a girlfriend, mistress, uh, something else, uh, entirely. Uh, what, what are your thoughts there? We don't need to set anything in stone, but I'd love to hear more about that.

Fiona: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the way that the letters, the address in the letters sort of go back and forth, negotiating how they're interacting with each other and how they're trying to position.

Their past and present relationship, is really quite extraordinary. So Heloise's first letter to Abelard, and I wonder if I just even can open it up. Let's see if I have it. Um, have it here. Um, she writes to him and says, sorry. She writes to him and says in the address To her Lord, or rather her father, husband, or rather brother from his handmaid, or rather his daughter, wife or rather sister to Abelard from Heloise. And so she has this incredibly sort of poetic and, and beautiful way of writing to him in that letter. Um, and he writes back, and people have certainly commented on this.

Much more, presumably that can be said. But, um, he writes back and says to Heloise his dearly beloved sister in Christ from Abelard, her brother in Him. And, and so the kind of range of relationships that she's still claiming or still invoking, playing around with, he sort of collapses back to the religious life, and that happens again in letter four, um, and letter five.

So where he ultimately sort of writes to her in Christ and as, um, a, a sister in Christ or, or really as he keeps on encouraging her, um, as the bride of Christ. And that's his address in letter five. So he writes to her, to the bride of Christ from Christ's servant. And this is something that's interested me in, previous work, but I, I think that if we really.

Try to think hard about the extent to which he's encouraging her to adopt this sort of bridal stance towards Christ, and she continuously claims of him, kind of the rights and obligations of their marriage. I. And even though, and again, I think this is something that struck me in working through this topic, even though she says that she had never wanted to be married by the time she is married to him, she claims that and claims it right until the end of her life.

If we are to imagine that she influenced the way that she was remembered after her death at the Paraclete. and so I think that marriage really did matter as a way of claiming the bond between them. She talks about the sacrament of marriage, that that unites them, that his obligation to her is bound on that, um, where he is constantly encouraging her to reconfigure herself in this spiritual way.

As a bride of Christ and she resists that. And I think that's really interesting also for the way in which we think about these characterizations of women as brides of Christ, which often are presented us through, um, male authors, observers, et cetera.

Loren: As well as saints Lives. It really seems like there's a good bit of overlap here with like the way that women, female saints are framed, uh, in this way and the, and that that marriage is very much reframed as this is this bride of Christ figure as well.

It's really interesting that he, he's really pushing that narrative on her, so much.

Fiona: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's very interesting 'cause you know, for him it also creates an opening to see himself as having a role. So when he writes to the bride of Christ from Christ's servant, he's sort of positing this triangular relationship where, you know, Heloise is the bride of Christ and he therefore, you know, through also caring for her in some way, providing a service to Christ, which is a valid spiritual service.

So he's kind of grasping around with. what his spiritual role here is and what his kind of meaningful contribution, um, if you can put it that way, uh, to, to the women's religious lives, what that is and what it should be.

Loren: well, so talking about this way that Heloise, initially rejects marriage and, and then later very much clings to it, that is really structurally how your article is sort of bookended at the very opening we have, um, you open with Heloise's objection, to the marriage and then we close with her, very powerfully adhering to it and, and claiming, claiming her status as, as, wife.

for me that, that brought up this, um, question that we, of course are still grappling with and it, it kind of brought up thoughts on, consent and their relationship and how, the nature of, one or the other consenting to, to their relationship changes throughout their lives. I think I'm asking the question in a bit of a roundabout way, but I wonder if we could get more into, thinking about that.

There's, there's of course a bit of an age difference between the two of them. There, there can be power imbalances in another sense. and so I, I feel like this is something that really colors the relationship as well. And then added on top of that, the legal problems surrounding clerical marriage, evolving.

Uh, uh, at the same time, uh, complicate things even further. we can, we can think more about this consent question. Um, I'll, I'll leave it. Somewhat open, I suppose, in terms of how to, to address it.

Fiona: Yeah, yeah.

There are a couple of, um, uh, maybe things that I wanna say in, in answering that question. So the, the first, um, is that, obviously there are two different forms of consent that we are thinking about, um, in, in your question. So one is. The modern form of consent. So consent, sexual intercourse, and um, and the other is this medieval form of consent to marriage, for instance, but also consent to separation.

And that's sort of implicit in, in many of the things that, I think will help us understand the letters. but to the first consent, um, and this brings up to some extent, uh, the question of age, which you've, invoked there. Um. Heloise is younger than Abelard. We've tended to think she's quite a lot younger than Abelard.

I think that that's tended to be sort of a, one part of the romanticization is that she's quite a young girl, a teenager, um, he's much older and this probably comes, from, you know, interpretations of their age or their death date. So, which is to say that, um, Abelard dies in 1142 and she dies just over 20 years later in 1164.

And, um, one might imagine were they the same age when they died, in which case she was 20 odd years younger than him. We have no reason to believe that that was the case. And, and I think that part of the romanticization of her, and going back to one of your earlier comments, the sense that she's like a sacrifice to Abelard or that she's, you know, um, that she's the, the person in the relationship who's, on the other end of a power imbalance has to do to a large extent with this idea that she's really a teenager and that he is the charismatic, intellectual figure in the school, and she is the student.

And that he is teaching her, and that she's younger. And so we have this sort of, gender imbalance, age imbalance, intellectual imbalance, and, um, and those have been questioned. Um, yeah, I, I mean extensively in, in, in recent years. And I'm thinking particularly of, Barbara Newman of course, as well. of Constant Mews's, uh, work making the case for Heloise as an intellectual figure in her own right.

Um, and um, and then also questioning this idea that she would've been 20 years younger. Um, and, and now there's a less of an age gap that people tend to think, um, that she was probably born in around ten ninety five, that she may have been sort of 15 years younger than him, but in her twenties at the time of the relationship.

I think understanding her as, an intellectual figure who was also having an influence on him Intellectually, we've seen, again, going back right to Peter Dronke's, work on Heloise as a writer, um, that she had an impact on him. That, that impact can even be traced by looking at his writings before and after the relationship and seeing the change in his, um, Latinity, et cetera.

so I think we have a, a sort of less sacrificial view of her, that she was a figure in her twenties and that would've made her actually more of a, a sort of 30-year-old woman when she became Abbess of the Paraclete, which of course, according to Canon law is about right. So, um, there are various reasons to understand her as not quite as young as we used to do.

Um. But going back to the question of consent, Abelard does tell us, um, and he remembers in later letters, particularly when he is trying to tell her, look, remember how bad I was to you? Remember how, um, how driven by lust I was? And he does say at that time that when she refused sex, that he, um, he bent her to his will.

And, um, and in that case he's referring specifically to when she was, obeying sort of, um, rules about sex on holy days. He's particularly referring there to to Easter, um, when Heloise was not, uh, consenting to have sex and he forced her to. Um, so, you know, the story that he tells of himself is not a sympathetic story.

And, and this makes for very, very difficult reading. Um, and that's not the only time that he refers to himself as striking her. He also refers to himself as striking her, in his autobiographical text when he was first teaching her, or hired to teach her, so to speak. And, um, and he refers to sort of pretending to strike her or striking her, but in this sort of pretense way in order to kind of, um, make others believe that they are engaged in kind of instruction rather than as they were, um, you know, speaking of love. So those are the moments where we hear him talking about striking Heloise. and the first, uh, which is when they were, living in Fulbert's house and he's pretending, to be teaching her, but not really teaching her anymore, um, I, I is problematic and, uh, but less so obviously than when he were refers to, um, forcing her to have sex when she was resisting.

And I then I would say there are two, there are two other types of consent that we might think about that is consent to marriage. Um, and Heloise you know, did not wanna consent to marriage. The fact that she ultimately did, but that she was forced to, or she, um, you know, marriage was not her idea.

She resisted it. She ultimately, went along with Abelard's plan, but it was a disastrous plan, and she points that out. Um, so that's how she remembers, you know, quote unquote consent to marriage. And then there's a second point of consent in their, in their kind of relationship, which is when, um, Abelard basically forces her to take the veil and become a nun.

And, uh, and the way he describes it in his letters is that she, she, she did this, um, she writes later that she had, had really not consented to that and that, um, that she. Again, went along with his plan, but felt mistrusted, felt forced. And so this is an important moment in his sort of religious narrative because people who were married, when one person decides to enter the religious life, the other person has to consent and they have to consent because for them, that would also be a vow of continence.

And Heloise was effectively consenting, as any wife whose husband became a priest or a monk, would have to consent. And we know that those are official. by the later middle Ages, we actually have, consent documents where a woman consents to separate from her husband so he can become a priest for instance.

And, and she tells us clearly that she had not given her consent, freely or willingly. And so we have these various different moments of, consent in this text, which, are very important legally, to us and to medieval people.

Loren: That's fascinating. And then we also have to think about as well, the way that these, these key moments are being framed, um, is rhetorically motivated as well.

I, I mean, I think you said before that, and in Abelard when he's writing his, you know, the story of his misfortunes, he's framing. the narrative of their relationship, with some distance. There's, there's a couple decades I think, um, between him writing the story of his misfortunes and, and the actual events themselves, but then also he's, he's framing these key moments in their relationship with intention for a purpose as well.

So, so even in these moments where he writes of, of forcing Heloise. We could even conceive of that as, as him kind of finding a way of, of, of, um, removing her from having any guilt in their sexual relationship as well. So it, it's very, it's messy. It's, it's really messy stuff

Fiona: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. The number of times I've read these letters, uh, and I go back and I read them again and I, you know, we don't understand, I think this relationship and if we think that we do or we think that we understand, you know, Heloise, we is within it. Um. We don't, because we don't have unfettered access to their, their thoughts here necessarily or, or to the sequence of events.

Maybe that's a better way of putting it. We, we don't really have a clear sense of the sequence of events. And, you know, we can put the letters together also with other evidence. Um, you know, the argument about the "Letters of Two Lovers" as being the authentic letters that they wrote during their relationship.

Um, that can help us understand maybe if, you know, if we understand those as authentic, we can, um, maybe build out some of the backstory of the relationship. I think placing them contextually in a historic moment. Is important because we've tended to sort of extract them from history as being so extraordinary and so unique that they stand outside of any kind of context.

And, and obviously nobody stands outside of a context and as fascinating as they were, they also lived in particular decades in a particular place that we can understand. And maybe by understanding that better, we can also understand them a little bit better as well.

Loren: Hmm.

Fiona: because I think we do have a tendency to wanna take this as a love story outside of time and, um, and, and then understand it in our own terms. And I think the temptation to understand it in our own terms is where we've maybe, uh, misunderstood Heloise by kind of presenting herself in a way that we, maybe not anymore, but once did in a sort of student teacher relationship.

And, um, and, and that I think has misled, you know, many generations in, into kind of seeing her in a different way than we should, or maybe pitying her, seeing her as sacrificial or tragic. I mean, the number of times you hear about this tragic affair, I think even the language of affair. Is one that leads us astray.

And so I've, I've tried really intentionally to talk about their relationship, not their affair, but we always used to talk about their affair. And, um, and that's been, I, I think something that, again, leads us astray. And I just wanna shout out for, um, Sarah McDougall, who, uh, who had a conversation with me about that and was really helpful.

So, um, thanks to other scholars who've, who've helped me see things that I wasn't seeing myself.

Loren: That, and that's so evident too in, in the article as well. You can see just the bulk of this, this entire conversation. I feel like you represent that so well, uh, in the article, in your own writing and in the, footnotes and everything too.

You can see this like long on and still ongoing conversation surrounding, um, what we make of this relationship, um, in, in terms of placing them. Continuing to place them in a more specific time. I wondered if, if we could take a moment to also think about their son Astralabe

Fiona: mm-hmm.

Loren: Um, the, I you point out that there's, there's not much that we know of him, but, you know, the, the nature of their relationship and, and their marriage and the events that follow and the developments in, in, clerical law also affect, him.

Uh, so I, I just wonder if you could tell us a bit more about, their son as well.

Fiona: Yeah, well I can now, but that's thanks to Brenda Cook who published a book in 2023 about Astralabe. Um, and, um, and so we do know more about him, uh, um, thanks to that, but really very, you know, building off of very few details and sort of trying to put them in context of, um, of thinking who he was and what evidence we have for his career.

Um, . Yeah, so I would encourage readers to, to go and read Brenda Cook's book, um, and, and have a deeper understanding of Astralabe.

Loren: so much of the work that you're doing here, really is all about reframing the way that we think about, Heloise. And one thing I love that you point out in the article is that Heloise could be the most substantial witness that we have, to clerical marriage. so I was wondering if we could, talk a bit more about what it is that we gain specifically from reading, the personal testimony of men and women whose lives were so directly affected by contemporary changes in Canon law.

Fiona: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you again. Um, this is a, a great question. Um, when I first started working on clerical marriage, I was sort of working against the historiography that said that you can't find these women. Um, they're unknowable. They, you know, they, they don't really appear in historic sources. it's difficult to find them, even if we know or think we know that a, um, a priest was married, it's usually just because.

He has sons who appear in a document alongside him, and the woman, the wife, the mother is sort of the shadowy figure. And so I was really interested in thinking about whether we can ever write about. Clerics wives as individuals, right? If we can ever give them any kind of subjectivity. And of course the answer is yes, we can.

As we've learned so many times over with women's history, that when you look, you find, and you often find much more than, um, you know, than received, wisdom has said exists. But I think that being able to kind of combine a story, which is a canon law story, and this is the way we've typically talked about, uh, clerical marriage and particularly this so, so-called celibacy movement is through law and regulation.

And then, more recently thinking about kind of men and masculinity, but really never being able to put women into the equation. And so, I think for me it's exciting to be able to think about like, we have this couple, we can watch them as they navigate some really challenging circumstances, we can watch them as they think about their relationship in the present.

That is in the 1130s when they're writing the letters, they're thinking about it retrospectively as they're kind of reflecting on what happened sort of a decade and a half previously. and, and we can see a little bit how they're remembered. you know, in terms of how Abelard is remembered as a canon and who then married.

And I think it helps us to sort of temper the stories and narratives that we have about clerical celibacy as being something that, was instituted from top-down legislation. And, and that then sort of happened very quickly, sort of over a generation. We can see in this account the, the kind of way in which from the, middle of the 11th century, even earlier than the middle of the 11th century.

If you look at the Council of Pavia, there are attempts to sort of expand clerical, uh, continence and the restriction of clerics from marrying. What we often think of as sort of celibacy is just too narrow a term, but we can see these kind of maximalist attempts to really separate clerics from women, and those aren't all successful.

We can then see how the legislation that comes in later actually is saying things that are different than we've tended to say. So, you know, the Lateran Councils are ruling against living with women against marrying if you're in, um, major orders, not against being married. And I think that we have to reckon with the fact that there were clerics like Abelard who were married and um, and those women.

Often, you know, can't be found in the record, but sometimes they can, and we can write their histories too. And Heloise is just a great example of that.

Loren: I can't think of a better point to, to move to a conclusion than that. I think that really captures, what, what's so exciting about, about this piece that you've written. And I, I really would encourage readers to go find, um, their copy of Speculum and, and give this a read. I'd like to thank you so much for, joining us here and and telling us so much more about your work. Um, I, I cannot, uh, endorse this article enough. I, I find it so fascinating and, and exciting to read, uh, and engaging. So thank you so much for being here, and thank you so much for, for continuing to do this work.

Fiona: Thank you, Loren. Thank you. It was such a pleasure. I really enjoyed talking today. Thank you.

Barbara: Many thanks to Fiona Griffiths and Loren Cantrell for this fascinating conversation. In addition, I want to thank the Speculum editorial staff, Ben Weil and Lily Stewart and the Medieval Academy itself for co-sponsoring this podcast. Music for the MMA is by Anna O'Connell. I'm Barbara Newman, editor of Speculum, the Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, published by the University of Chicago Press.

If you join the Medieval Academy, you'll receive a subscription to both print and digital editions online. You can find us at journals.uchicago.edu. We'll be back in July with the next episode of Speculum Spotlight.

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