Translating Communities: The Institutional Epilogue to the Letters of Abelard and Heloise

This article explores the relationship between literary and juridical translation through examination of the institutional epilogue to the letters of Abelard and Heloise. This epilogue consists of the literary translations of their letters that proliferated after their deaths, as well as the institutional letters of translation written at each transfer of their bodily remains to a new site or tomb. I demonstrate in particular the way in which successive generations have edited, collected, and re-membered the bodily and literary corpus of the two clerics into new communities through acts of translation