Making Love in the Twelfth Century: "Letters of Two Lovers" in Context. A new translation with commentary by Barbara Newman by Barbara Newman (review)

Only a scholar like Barbara Newman, with vast experience in medieval amatory literature, could accomplish what she has in this new translation and commentary on the twelfth-century "Letters of Two Lovers" [Epistolae duorum amantium or EDA], aka the "Lost Letters of Abelard and Heloise" as Constance Mews had deemed them in a translation of that name from 1999 (second edition 2008). The volume also includes the "Love Letters from Tegernsee," a set of mostly female-authored letters from Germany "presumably in an abbey of nuns or canonesses" (229). Newman takes pride in presenting these Tegernsee texts because they are generally unfamiliar to the Anglophone world; they include two "effusive letters to male friends and relatives" and also three that "express intimate love between women," and two that are "seduction attempts by importunate male teachers, which the young nuns shyly or fiercely refuse" (4). As the book's title indicates, these letters serve, as do all the letter collections sampled, to provide "context" in which to understand the EDA and to consider its authenticity as, potentially, the actual letters referred to by Abelard and Heloise as their prior correspondence (HC 16 and Heloise letter 2.16). Newman knows what's a stake and that readers for 800 years have been compelled by the story of these two, ill-fated lovers in one of the most famous romantic stories in Western, or World literature, and she teases the reader appropriately before making any claim about adding the EDA to their corpus.

So instead of starting with an assertion about attribution, Newman spins a story and plays detective, bringing the readers along on an inquiry into the potential lives behind a series of letters written between lovers in the twelfth century, transcribed—with some evidently substantial editing—by Johannes de Vepria in the fifteenth century, 350 years after composition, and discovered only in the twentieth century. The Preface surveys the detailed history of debate about these letters, and traces how controversies about the authenticity of the actual correspondences between Abelard and Heloise, combined with a pre-feminist urge to delegitimize her as author, made authoritative work on the EDA secondary if not impossible for a generation of scholars. Always gracious to past scholars, Newman is however clear that even though the "pioneering English translation by [Constance] Mews and his student Neville Chiavaroli has served scholarship well thus far, it is time now to correct its several inaccuracies and infelicities in light of subsequent research" (xiv).

Newman studies any number of related letters of the period, Ovidian and otherwise, that set the context for studying her target texts. Reading through these, sometimes artificial exchanges (fictional exercises meant to teach rhetoric, epistolary arts, and ethics), and by examining some of the most famous letters of the era by well-known authors such as Baudri and Marbod, Newman paints the picture of a culture almost obsessed with letters. Thus her introductory chapter "An Essay in the History of Emotions" is also a history of synthetic expressions of emotion, the craft of feigning various versions of Ovidian desire and loss. Readers may get a bit impatient in this survey of lesser-known and sometimes pro-forma letters and may skip recklessly ahead to peak at the Letters themselves. Newman's crafty structure invites this misbehavior, and one can always go back and absorb the scholarly background after poring over the exciting letters themselves, in which a student and teacher ponder and debate their overwhelming desires. The manuscript history and trials of transmission have, shows Newman, striped the EDA of any historical information that would have helped us with our detective work, and there are narrative lacunae and many aporias, but that just makes the reader more engaged in the evaluations. The text identifies the correspondents only starkly as Mulier and Vir [Woman and Man], oddly...