Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman (review)

Reviews 241 nor his son Solomon is believed to be his equal in the corruption of so many young women, nor even Jupiter (as long as his sophisticalflatteriesfell upon girls)'(P 122). Shopkow provides invaluable comment in endnotes about the many figures who float in and out of what is effectively an extended soap opera of the lesser nobility. M y only regret was that chronological annotations were not inserted into the main narrative to help the reader follow which decade was being talked about. Translation offloridLatinate prose is never easy. In breaking up extravagant sentences Shopkow has provided a valuable service, without sacrificing authenticity. O n occasion she includes some fascinating observation of inaccuracies in Duby's presentation of the History, as for example (p. 201 n. 86) about the way he presented illegitimate daughters of a noble house as the sexual preserve ofsons, while ignoring the way the narrative shows that they were treated like legitimate younger sons. There is much detail here that students could use to question some ofDuby's assumptions about aristocratic society. Duby's fondness for Lambert's admiring presentation of the grand seigneurs of Guines led him to argue that his account typified an aristocratic model of marriage, pragmatic and worldly, as distinct from an ecclesiastical ideal that was rigorous and otherworldly. Reading the History makes one question the artificial character of any such distinctions, as indeed any attempt to read a literary text as evidence of the ideology of society as a whole. Shopkow's translation of the History should be included in all courses on aristocratic society and culture in the Middle Ages. Constant J. Mews School of Historical Studies Monash University Wheeler, Bonnie, ed., Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman (The N e w Middle Ages), London, Macmillan, 2000; cloth; pp. xxii, 394; R.R.P. £30.00; ISBN 0333800303. The twelfth-century Heloise will forever be identified with Abelard; together they are the archetypal star-crossed lovers. She is known through her association with him, a w o m a n who, after her lover was castrated and retired to a monastery, took the veil as a nun. They then exchanged a series of letters about theological and philosophical issues. Here at last, in this carefully crafted symposium, we get an Heloise w h o is far more than that; she is a w o m a n who deserves to be 242 Reviews given recognition for who she was, for what she thought, said and did, as an eminent scholar in her o w n right. All contributors to this volume are to be congratulated for their excellent essays; moreover, each has read the contirbution of the others so that there is a pleasing unity in the collection dedicated to redressing the invisibility of an Heloise w h o has been interpreted only as the consort ofAbelard. It is arranged in a cyclic chronology of Heloise's life, beginning with an essay on 'Heloise the Abbess', by Mary Martin McLaughlin, which details the establishment and the expansion of the Paraclete. She points out the particular 'feminist' quality of the abbey whereby 'the commemorations of female saints [were] given marked prominence in the calendar'. (10) McLaughlin refers to the 'authenticity debate' in her opening paragraph, but confines discussion of it to a footnote: it is the next chapter, 'Authenticity revisited' by John Marebon, that takes up the issue. After a brief review of the chronology of the debate on the authenticity of the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, Marebon then concentrates on the ideological isuues surrounding the question of authenticity. His concluding remarks refer to the following chapter, 'Philosophical themes in the Epistolae duorum amantium: thefirstletters of Heloise and Abelard', by Constant J. Mews. Marebon says that M e w s ' identification of the lost early love letters ofAbelard and Heloise 'will do even more to bring new material and new knowledge about women in the twelfth century to bear on Heloise' (p. 30). Chapter Four, 'The young Heloise and Latin rhetoric: some preliminary comments on the "lost" love letters and their significance' by John O. Ward and Neville Chiavaroli, demonstrates through rhetorical analysis the...