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98 Chapter 2
was that she was the rightful occupant; this is what her title deed said; and
the second replied that it was null and void from the moment she became
a nun: what use does a nun have for a castle? [5653] But a king’s daughter
does, who has the power to give and to take away, and let the nun read her
psalter in the abbey and in the church! (Ille et Galeron, trans. Eley, 191)
Ille eventually marries the second lady, after rescuing her from
an unwanted suitor and his army. The religious legitimacy of the
marriage is stressed:
All the Romans eagerly endeavoured to see to it that Ille the noble warrior
should have the crown; they were all well aware that his wife was a nun.
Duke Ille wanted it very much, and the prospect did not displease Ganor
[the other woman] in the least; the pope used his best endeavours; so there
was no alternative but for it to be done. The pope celebrated their marriage;
Rome was glad and rejoiced at it. (Ille et Galeron, trans. Eley, 221)
Abelard and H‹elo•§se
Abelard or the Abelard persona in Letter 4 of the famous correspondence
with H‹elo•§se had thought di·erently, and this was the
view that would ultimately prevail. When they were both committed
by vows to the religious life, he had still been able to write:
Come too, my inseparable companion, and join me in thanksgiving, you
who were made my partner both in guilt and in grace. For the Lord is not
unmindful also of your own salvation, indeed, he has you much in mind,
for by a kind of holy presage of his name he marked you out to be especially
his when he named you H‹elo•§se, after his own name, Elohim. In his mercy,
I say, he intended to provide for two people in one, the two whom the devil
sought to destroy in one; since a short while before this happening he had
bound us together by the indissoluble bond of the marriage sacrament.
Most scholars at present think that the correspondence is genuine
or at least that it is an only semi-fictionalized literary composition
by Abelard and H‹elo•§se themselves. Abelard died in 1142/3, so the
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. B. Radice (Harmondsworth etc.,
1974), 149 (in the revised edition by M. Clanchy (2003) the passage will be found
under ‘Letter 5’, p. 83).
M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997), 15, 154–5.
D. Luscombe, ‘From Paris to the Paraclete: The Correspondence of Abelard
and Heloise’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 74 (1988), 247–83, esp. 270, and
also 278, where he raises the attractive and plausible possibility of a ‘compact between
Heloise and Abelard jointly to share, compose and exchange their thoughts,
experiences and principles in fictive correspondence’.