Hélinant de Froidmont. Vers de la Mort, ed. E.Walberg. Paris: Droz, 1905.
Blum, Claude. La représentation de la mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance. 2 vols.
Geneva: Slatkine, 1989, Vol. 1: D’Hélinant de Froidmont a Ronsard.
Paden, William D. “De Monachis rithmos facientibus: Helinant de Froidmont, Bertran de Born and
the Cistercian General Chapter of 1199.” Speculum 55(1980):669–85.
HÉLOÏSE
(1100/01–1163/64). Héloïse, abbess of the famous monastery of the Paraclete and its six
daughter houses, was raised as a possibly illegitimate child in the Benedictine convent of
Sainte-Marie of Argenteuil. At the age of seventeen, she continued her studies at her
uncle Fulbert’s house in Paris, where she was tutored by the theologian Peter Abélard
(1079–1142). After a stormy love affair with Héloïse, Abélard offered the Paraclete and
its lands as a refuge to Héloïse and her fellow nuns. Pope Innocent II confirmed the
donation in 1131. Héloïse left us three letters to Abélard and one letter to Peter the
Venerable (ca. 1092–1156). She is mentioned frequently in the cartulary of the Paraclete
as a competent and efficient abbess who turned her religious house into one of the most
prestigious women’s monasteries in France. Its rule stressed the importance of education
for all nuns, the unusual relaxation of strict enclosure, and the authority of the abbess
over both male and female members of the monastic community.
In Peter Abélard’s biographical Historia calamitatum and his moving correspondence
with her, Héloïse emerges as an articulate and heroic person who equals Abélard in
rhetorical sophistication and surpasses him in personal integrity. Her letters reveal a
woman of deep love and devotion who remained attached to Abélard with both the bond
of friendship and the memory of their earlier passion. Moreover, in her own mind, she
was convinced that she had acted throughout the entire affair with disinterested love,
devoted only to Abélard, while he had begun with lust only and never achieved her level
of disinterested love, even though it was he who had taught her the true understanding of
love and friendship.
Ulrike Wiethaus
[See also: ABÉLARD, PETER; ARGENTEUIL; PETER THE VENERABLE]
Abélard, Peter. Historia calamitatum: texte critique avec introduction, ed. Jacques Monfrin. 2nd
ed. Paris: Vrin, 1962.
Peter the Venerable. The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable. 2 vols. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967.
Radice, Betty, trans. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
Charrier, Charlotte. Héloïse dans l’histoire et la légende. Paris: Champion, 1933.
Newman, Barbara. “Authority, Authenticity, and the Repression of Heloise.” Journal of Medieval
and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992):121–57.
Pernoud, Régine. Héloïse and Abélard, trans. Peter Wiles. London: Collins, 1973.
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