In her first letter to Peter Abelard, Heloise d’Argenteuil claims that given a choice between marrying “Augustus, ruler of the world” and being called Abelard’s “whore” (56), the latter would always be dearer.
It’s a stunning claim, often understood to be a hyperbolic declaration of her love — a love so strong, she would be willing to demean herself to indulge in it. But, when given the option to marry Abelard, Heloise tries to dissuade him “from this marriage … and its disastrous bed” (56). It is true that, though Heloise’s “heart belonged only to [Abelard],” she never wished for a marriage (55). Of this conviction, she famously writes, “The name of wife may have the advantage of sanctity and safety, but to me the sweeter name will always be lover or, if your dignity can bear it, concubine or whore” (55).
For Abelard and Heloise, marriage certainly seemed the solution to their controversial romance: a young woman fornicating with her live-in tutor under the roof of her uncle, a high-ranking church official, in twelfth-century Paris. And though Heloise advises against it, the marriage that would make their affair licit eventually is forced upon her. Nevertheless, Abelard is castrated and the couple is forced to separate, with Abelard becoming a monk and Heloise an abbess. Years later, Heloise would write her first letter to Abelard, making the declarations described above.
To a modern reader of this letter, Heloise’s position seems a paradox. In modern popular culture, marriage assumes love, but in her letter, Heloise claims she “preferred love over marriage” (56). In one line, she suggests that two concepts which seem inextricably linked are distinct choices. By disaggregating love and marriage, Heloise frames forbidden relationships as love-filled, parroting a surprisingly common concept in the period’s love literature.
Like the opening of this first letter, Heloise’s musings on marriage creates several false binaries: between love and marriage, being called a lover and a wife, or a concubine or whore and a wife. She implicitly characterizes love as being associated with the lover, concubine, and whore, and the title of wife with the formal bond of marriage. In this construction, the latter is entirely devoid of feeling.
While Heloise’s view that her love — characterized as all-consuming, irreplaceable, and seemingly critical to her sense of self — cannot be captured in the bond of marriage, the literary language of love during this century captures a similar sentiment. Together, Heloise's letter and the larger canon of twelfth-century troubadour love poems capture a surprising popular conception of the relationship between love and marriage which dignifies the experience of the forbidden lover.
The troubadour love poems of the twelfth century rarely mention the bonds of marriage. The lovers they describe are having secret affairs (Non chant per auzel ni per flor, 65), lamenting the parting which must take place at dawn (En un vergier sotz fuella d'albespi, 129), or begging a watchman to keep a lookout for a woman’s husband while she sleeps with another man (Gaita be, gaiteta del chastel, 103). These poems rely heavily on natural imagery to characterize love, which contrasts sharply with the conspicuously absent and manmade law of marriage.
While we cannot be certain that Heloise was consuming this literary language of love, one which was primarily developing in the southern Occitan region and would have only been brought north later in her life, their shared implicit claim that love is a thing found outside of marriage should not be deemed a coincidence. It's unlikely that this concept was isolated to this region in the south of France and Heloise’s mind. Instead, these semi-disparate examples suggest that this concept pervaded society.
What does such a concept mean for the reality of the forbidden lover? While it is unreasonable to assume medieval marriages were devoid of love, it seems likely that, insofar as love — especially forbidden love — is seen as a product of human nature, the position of the forbidden lover was publicly understood and perhaps even sympathized with.
Although Heloise’s claim that the terms “lover,” “concubine,” or “whore” would be sweeter seems a shocking one, in the context of a literary language of love that romanticizes the forbidden lover as an epitome of feeling her wish makes more sense. She is not saying that she would be willing to demean herself in order to be with Abelard; rather, she is reflecting a popular conception of love that privileges the feelings associated with those relationships and conceives marriage as a man-made “chain” of natural “feeling.”
Works Cited
D'Argenteuil, Heloise, = Levitan, William, trans. Abelard and Heloise: The Letters and Other Writings (Cambridge, 2007), 49-62.
Troubadour Poetry = Kline, A.S., trans. From Dawn to Dawn: Troubadour Poetry (2018).
Image one = Depiction of Abelard and Heloise from the Rijksmuseum, public domain.
Image two = Fifteenth century drawing of troubadours from an unknown artist, public domain.
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