Authority, Authenticity and the Repression of Heloise
By Barbara Newman
From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, edited by Barbara Newman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)
Introduction: In the annals of medieval scholarship, questions about the authencity of sources are not rare. Few texts, however, have languished in the limbo of aporia as long as the letters of Heloise to Abelard. For two centuries now these three epistles have been subjected, not only to suspicion, but to the most persistent and stubborn assaults on their authencity, as well as the most spirited defenses. Whole forest have been felled in the quarrel over Heloise’s writing, especially of the first two letters, which occupy a mere eleven pages in Muckle’s edition. Yet still there is no consensus, for it more than the solution of a textual crux, more even than entrenched academic pride, that is at stake. It is the very battle of the sexes, or what we are now pleased to call the “discourse of desire.” As Linda Kauffman has recently written, Heloise’s letters, like other epistolary texts that follow in their wake, “have aroused centuries of controversy concerning origins, authencity, legitimacy, paternity,” for such texts raise a most dangerous question: “What does it mean to ‘write like a woman?”
By Barbara Newman
From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature, edited by Barbara Newman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995)
Introduction: In the annals of medieval scholarship, questions about the authencity of sources are not rare. Few texts, however, have languished in the limbo of aporia as long as the letters of Heloise to Abelard. For two centuries now these three epistles have been subjected, not only to suspicion, but to the most persistent and stubborn assaults on their authencity, as well as the most spirited defenses. Whole forest have been felled in the quarrel over Heloise’s writing, especially of the first two letters, which occupy a mere eleven pages in Muckle’s edition. Yet still there is no consensus, for it more than the solution of a textual crux, more even than entrenched academic pride, that is at stake. It is the very battle of the sexes, or what we are now pleased to call the “discourse of desire.” As Linda Kauffman has recently written, Heloise’s letters, like other epistolary texts that follow in their wake, “have aroused centuries of controversy concerning origins, authencity, legitimacy, paternity,” for such texts raise a most dangerous question: “What does it mean to ‘write like a woman?”
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