Letters of Abelard and Heloise
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The Letters of Heloise and Abelard is a series of letters between French priest Peter Abelard and his female student Héloïse d’Argenteuil after his castration and their separation. These letters were also the inspiration for Alexander Pope's poem "Eloisa to Abelard".
These letters are only known by posthumous copies which makes it impossible to ascertain their authenticity, no original copies of these letters exist. The history of the letters is discussed at length by Constant Mews.
The story of Heloise and Abelard is one of an illicit love of Heloise for, and secret marriage to, her teacher Pierre Abélard, and the brutal vengeance her family exacts when they castrate him, not realizing that the lovers had married.
Castration episode
- "Violently incensed, [Fulbert and his henchmen] laid a plot against me, and one night, while I, all unsuspecting, was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they broke in with the help of one of my servants, whom they had bribed. There they had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful punishment, such as astounded the whole world, for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow. This done, straightway they fled, but two of them were captured, and suffered the loss of their eyes and their genital organs." --Historia calamitatum
Publication history
The original Latin text was published in Paris in 1616, but it was only after the publication of a French translation of the correspondence in 1693 that these letters began to attract wide public attention.
John Hughes (c. 1678-1720) was not a great poet, but his translation of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, preceded by a summary of their lives by Pierre Bayle (first published in 1713), was of enormous popularity throughout the eighteenth century.
See also
