PETER ABELARD was a French scholastic philosopher and the greatest logician of the twelfth century. He taught mainly in Paris where his fame attracted students from all over Europe and laid the foundations of the University of Paris. HELOISE was his pupil, and after the tragic end of their love affair and marriage she became a nun, and Abelard a monk in the Abbey of St Denis. He continued to teach theology, but his unorthodoxy led to open conflict with St Bernard of Clairvaux and his condemnation by the Church. His last months were spent under the protection of Peter the Venerable, and he died in a Cluniac priory. Heloise became abbess of the convent of the Paraclete which Abelard founded, and was acclaimed for her learning, her poetry and her music.
Abelard and Heloise are shown on the front cover debating about love and marriage, as described by Jean de Meun in the Roman de la Rose. The contrast between them is stark. Abelard is dressed in the fine clothes of a layman, despite being a cleric and a master in the schools, whereas Heloise is garbed as a nun. This depicts the critical time when he removed her to the convent of Argenteuil and vested her as a nun, even though he continued to visit her and have sexual intercourse. As a consequence, her family believed that he had repudiated her and they took vengeance by castrating him.
The rubric, the two lines in red above the miniature, is explanatory. It reads: Comment Helouys labeesse / Entrodit Pierres Abalart (How Peter Abelard instructs Heloise). However, the hand gestures in the miniature show Abelard and Heloise engaged in debate rather than instruction. The two lines in black read: Pierres Abalart le confesse/Qui Suer Helouys labeesse (Peter Abelard confesses that Sister Heloise the abbess [never wished to agree to be his wedded wife]).
BETTY RADICE read classics at Oxford. She became joint editor of the Penguin Classics list in 1964. She translated Livy’s Rome and Italy, the Latin comedies of Terence, Pliny’s Letters and Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and wrote the Introduction to Horace’s The Complete Odes and Epodes and Propertius: The Poems, all for Penguin Classics. She also edited and introduced Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life for the Penguin English Library. She collaborated as a translator in the Collected Works of Erasmus, and was the author of the Penguin Reference Book Who’s Who in the Ancient World. Betty Radice was an honorary fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and a vice-president of the Classical Association. She died in 1985.
MICHAEL CLANCHY is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He taught at the University of Glasgow 1964–85. He is the author of From Memory to Written Record (second edition, 1993), England and its Rulers, 1066–1272 (second edition, 1998) and Abelard: A Medieval Life (1997), which has been translated into French and German. He is now at Merton College, Oxford.