Heloise Redressed: Rhetorical Engagement and the Benedictine Rite of Initiation in Heloise’s Third Letter

Abstract

In the history of criticism on Heloise (when her letters have been regarded as authentic), the twelfth-century abbess’s display of passion in her first two letters of correspondence with Abelard, captivates us as a natural, unfeigned expression.¹ However, her later response to Abelard in her third letter, the seemingly arid exegesis of scripture, and other texts, to support her request for a woman’s rule makes her a much less enchanting literary subject. Nonetheless, the analytical tone Heloise adopts in Ep. 6 represents an intriguing departure from the impassioned voces she employs in her first two letters.This change, however, has proven difficult for many scholars to accept at face value without thinking of it as representing either a form of emotional (and female) manipulation or evidence of some repression of Heloise’s passion.² The psychobehavioral meaning assumed to be operating behind Heloise’s shift in rhetorical strategy is discernible in the critical effort to determine whether it is Abelard or Heloise who exerts the stronger influence on the other partner in their debate (presumably Abelard in much of the critical discussion until now).³ These debates have transpired in response to a surplus of relatively recent theories that try to explain Heloise’s third letter as a work signifying a rather puzzling “conversion.” Linda Georgianna, in her perceptive reading of Ep. 6 as Heloise’s critique of monastic life, observes that the difference between Heloise’s first two letters and her third presents critics with a gap that they often try to fill by imposing a linear psychological unity on Heloise’s letters.

[Heloise] herself was not ashamed to write in her letters to her beloved, whom she loved so well that she called him father and lord, strange words that many people would think absurd.

—Jean de Meun, “The Advice of a Friend,” The Romance of the Rose

Heloise’s third letter is her treatise on the relation between infirmitas and virtus. Using a request formulated in an imitatio of the Benedictine Initiation Rite, she draws on both pagan and monastic literary traditions to propose that men and women religious in general and she and Abelard in particular, must share the material and relational habitus of the monastic life if they are to experience the spiritual communitas and enduring amicitia that is its goal.