Héloïse (; c. 1100–01?éloï – 16 May 1163–64?), variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess.
Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
She is famous in history and popular culture for her love affair and correspondence with the leading medieval logician and theologian Peter Abelard, who became her colleague, collaborator and husband. She is known for exerting critical intellectual influence upon his work and posing many challenging questions to him such as those in the Problemata Heloissae.
Her surviving letters are considered a foundation of French and European literature and primary inspiration for the practice of courtly love. Her erudite and sometimes erotically charged correspondence is the Latin basis for the bildungsroman genre and serve alongside Abelard's Historia Calamitatum as a model of the classical epistolary genre. Her influence extends on later writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Madame de Lafayette, Thomas Aquinas, Choderlos de Laclos, Voltaire, Rousseau, Simone Weil, and Dominique Aury.
She is an important figure in the establishment of women's representation in scholarship and is known for her controversial portrayals of gender and marriage which influenced the development of modern feminism.
Name
Héloïse is variously spelled Heloise, Helöise, Héloyse, Hélose, Heloisa, Helouisa, Eloise, and Aloysia. Her first name is probably a feminization of Eloi, the French form of Saint Eligius, a Frankish goldsmith, bishop, and courtier under Dagobert I much venerated in medieval France. Some scholars alternatively derive it from Proto-Germanic reconstructed as *Hailawidis, from *hailagaz ("holy") or *hailaz ("healthy") and *widuz ("wood, forest"). The details of her family and original surname are unknown. She is sometimes called Heloise of Argenteuil () from her childhood convent or Heloise of the Paraclete () from her midlife appointment as abbess of the convent of the Paraclete near Troyes, France.
Life
Background and education
Early in life, Héloïse was recognized as a leading scholar of Latin, Greek and Hebrew hailing from the convent of Argenteuil just outside Paris, where she was educated by nuns until adolescence. She was already renowned for her knowledge of language and writing when she arrived in Paris as a young woman, and had developed a reputation for intelligence and insight. Abélard writes that she was nominatissima, "most renowned" for her gift in reading and writing. She wrote poems, plays and hymns, some of which have been lost.
Her family background is largely unknown. She was the ward of her maternal uncle (avunculus) Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame and the daughter of a woman named Hersinde, who is sometimes speculated to have been Hersint of Champagne (Lady of Montsoreau and founder of the Fontevraud Abbey) or possibly a lesser known nun called Hersinde at the convent of St. Eloi (from which the name "Heloise" would have been taken).
In her letters she implies she is of a lower social standing than Peter Abélard, who was originally from the lower nobility, though he had rejected knighthood to be a philosopher. Speculation that her mother was Hersinde of Champagne/Fontrevaud and her father Gilbert Garlande contests with Heloise's depiction of herself as lower class than Abelard. Hersinde of Champagne was of lower nobility, and the Garlandes were from a higher social echelon than Abelard and served as his patrons. The Hersinde of Champagne theory is further complicated by the fact that Hersinde of Champagne died in 1114 between the ages of 54 and 80, implying that she would have had to have given birth to Heloise between the ages of 35 and 50.
What is known for sure is that her Uncle Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame collected her to Notre Dame from her childhood home in Argentuil. By her mid teens to early twenties, she was renowned throughout France for her scholarship. While her birth year is disputed, she is traditionally held to be about 15 to 17 when meeting Abelard. By the time she became his student, she was already of high repute herself. As a poetic and highly literate prodigy of female sex familiar with multiple languages, she attracted much attention, including the notice of Peter the Venerable of Cluny, who notes that he became aware of her acclaim when he and she were both young. She soon attracted the romantic interest of celebrity scholar Peter Abelard.