No Outlet for Incontinence: Heloise and the Question of Consolation

Abstract

It is rather well known that in the course of her indignant response to the Historia calamitatum, Heloise protests her surprise that after the earlier trauma of their separation and her abrupt entry into religious life, Abelard had not thought of comforting her through the medium of letters. Here he was, sending a Consolatory Letter to a Friend (“Abaelardi ad amicum consolatoria,” as two manuscripts identify what we now call the Historia)¹ that presumed to include dispassionate comment on herself, yet there was no sign of any consolatory epistles to her—a once-intimate friend upon whom he might be expected to lavish rather more concern. She hardly need remind him, she pointedly remarks—“Your superior wisdom knows better than our humble learning” [tua melius excellentia quam nostra parvitas novit]—of the “many serious treatises” that the holy Fathers carefully compiled “for the instruction or exhortation or even the consolation of holy women” [in doctrina vel exhortatione seu etiam consolatione sanctarum feminarum].² Perhaps because it seems to generalize or because it takes knowledge for granted, this allusion has been greeted by most readers with only a vague nod of recognition.Yet as is now becoming increasingly apparent, Heloise and her husband conduct sinuous and probing disputations through the medium of their shared reading, through their mutual sense of specialized vocabularies and discourses, through their deployment of cultural masks.³ So, should we not ask the logical questions: What treatises of instruction, exhortation, consolation? by whom? and what models are available there for adaptation by the present correspondents? Above all, how might such “treatises” have helped configure the process or dynamic that the correspondence enacts?

Heloise renegotiates Abelard’s role and her own by invoking consolatory patristic letters to educated women, which clarify the “remedy” that would properly match their own situation.