Lust, revenge and the religious right in 12th century Paris

Burge's fascination with the Middle Ages, according to his biographical blurb, stems from his university study of medieval philosophy, and his enthusiasm pays off in the sections devoted to those ideas. He clearly explains Abelard's theories and his heresy trials and makes us feel the weight and implications of those defeats without moralizing. His writing is best, in fact, when he's connecting Abelard's philosophy to the couple's actions and to the political life around them. When Heloise becomes abbess of the Paraclete -- a monastery that Abelard founded -- Burge portrays the move as not just a practicality but also an event that would make the Paraclete the last feminist holdout against the tide of misogyny threatening women's roles in religious life.

What Burge fails to engage with -- and it is no small failing -- are Heloise's eroticism and, by extension, the sexual life of the couple. For just as Abelard's philosophy dictated their actions, so did Heloise's sexuality fuel the drama that led to Abelard's castration and their later epistolary relationship.

Little is known of Heloise's life, and Burge does his best to spin out her tale from the available scraps of information. Burge admires Heloise -- for her startling frankness about sexual matters and for the exceptional prose that makes her letters powerful and immediate 900 years later. He notes that Heloise never wanted to get married, nor did she want to take the veil after Abelard's castration. She did those things out of submission to her lover, of which she reminds Abelard in her letters. "The name of wife may seem more sacred or more binding," she wrote, "but sweeter for me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore." As for her role as convent abbess, Heloise did not repent of her premarital relationship with Abelard and insisted that she never would.

Burge also discusses Heloise's revolutionary insistence on "the reconciliation of religion and the life of a lover," as well as her seemingly paradoxical ability to exercise free will in the act of submission. But just as he begins to delve into the erotic nature of her relationship with Abelard, he pulls back, and the result is a less-than-full portrait of a sexually complex woman whose ideas were as threatening to the reformist movement as Abelard's were.

Some of Burge's hesitation is understandable; Heloise and Abelard's sex was certainly not mainstream, and reconciling Heloise's submissiveness with her intelligence and her proto-feminism streak is no easy task. In discussing their sex in the church refectory, Burge suggests that Abelard might have forced himself on Heloise against her will, for "she might have had a slightly more developed sense of propriety than he did." But just as likely, such scenarios of domination were part of their erotic play. Abelard mentions twice in the letter to his friend that he used corporal punishment in his lessons with Heloise; Burge doubts that Fulbert would have instructed Abelard to hit his niece, saying that for Abelard "in his mind it was an integral part of the erotic content of the affair." But later Burge points out that Fulbert was prone to rages, so why wouldn't the uncle have allowed Abelard to hit Heloise? And given the dominant/submissive nature of their sex, why wouldn't this have been erotic for Heloise, too? The evidence in Heloise's letters favors a portrait in which submissiveness wasn't just a declaration of love; it was also a turn-on. Look at the orgasmic way she describes taking her vows as a nun, something she never wanted to do:

"I carried out your orders so implicitly that when I was powerless to oppose you in anything, I found strength at your command to destroy myself. I did more -- strange to say -- my love rose to such heights of madness that it robbed itself of what it most desired beyond hope of recovery, when immediately at your bidding I changed my clothing along with my mind, in order to prove you the sole possessor of my body and will alike."

Burge comments that this passage is Heloise at her submissive best, that perhaps she had "that feeling of reckless freedom that comes from the total surrender of the will," but he doesn't take his speculation to the realm of fleshly desire. By shying away from the sexual, he misses some of the best drama in Heloise and Abelard's letter writing. Abelard, after his castration, naturally found himself reevaluating his sense of self, and that self no longer included a place for the erotic. For Heloise, though, the erotic was everything.

Heloise wrote, "Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image, so that I live through it all again with you. Even in sleep I know no respite. Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word." Burge flags this as an exceptional piece of sexual writing, but it's also a calculated attempt by Heloise to induce desire in Abelard, a sort of early phone sex. When Abelard writes back, "I thought that this bitterness of heart at what was so clear an act of divine mercy had long since disappeared," he's not just urging her to accept God's will but also resisting the erotic within himself.

It was Heloise's complex ideas about submissiveness and freedom, about sexuality and religion, that made her famous. What her letters allow us to glimpse is a Christianity that can accommodate eroticism, a faith that doesn't preclude desire. The difference between religious and sexual rapture has always been ambiguous, and more than anyone else of her time, Heloise embodied their fusion. Coupled with Abelard's theories of logic, Heloise's beliefs speak to the constant struggle between the light of reason and the reactionary forces of intolerance. Burge's biography is an excellent study of medieval thought, but it doesn't go quite far enough. By skimming over the erotic, he misses the chance to fully explore what effects this medieval religious conflict had on our ideas of sex and gender. Perhaps his skittishness says more about the time we live in now: one in which sexuality and religion are pitted against each other, in which books that embrace the erotic are often dismissed as little more than pornography. One that, at times, feels positively medieval.

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