Making Love in the Twelfth Century: “Letters of Two Lovers” in Context by Barbara Newman (review)

A fifteenth-century Cistercian monk uncovers a cache of love letters, epistolary evidence of a secret romance from long ago. Admiring their rhetorical style, he transcribes the exchange. It is doubtful that he knew the lovers’ identities, since his manuscript does not reveal them. However, some five hundred years later, a modern editor publishes the letters with a provocative subtitle: “Letters of Abelard and Heloise?” The story has the makings of a novel, and, like the correspondence of that famous, twelfth-century couple, the anonymous letters have stirred many to ask, “fact or fiction?” Do these “letters of two lovers” reflect the love affair between Abelard and Heloise or even an affair between any two, actual twelfth-century figures? Or are they a rhetorical exercise, crafted perhaps by a single (male) author?

As Newman points out in her illuminating study, the nature of love letters raises the question of authenticity, because they embody a desire to dazzle through literary skill while assuring the reader of the sender’s sincere affection. Newman’s close reading of the letters situates them firmly within twelfth-century literary culture, a culture where proficiency was acquired through imitating secular and sacred models. Classical, biblical, and medieval sources influenced diction as well as tone and genre. Ironically, the more accomplished the stylist, the more a letter’s authenticity as a representation of the author’s sentiments might be questioned. Newman’s method is to contextualize the anonymous letters within contemporary emotional and textual communities. Her translations and commentary highlight the lovers’ fluency in their sources and expand our understanding of how a laywoman could participate in the literary culture associated with the cathedral schools and convents. Demonstrating also where the letters differ from any known exempla, she shines light on their unique expressions. While Newman leaves it to the reader to decide whether the exchange should be ascribed to Heloise and Abelard, she draws tantalizing attention to the parallels between the woman’s letters and those of Heloise in their particular fusion of profane and spiritual love. Here, there were no models to imitate.