Flaws in the Golden Bowl: Gender and Spiritual Formation in the Twelfth Century

Abstract

In the early 1130s Peter Abelard received three letters from Heloise, once his mistress and wife, now his sister and daughter in religion. The first two were so traumatic that he must have thought twice before scanning the third, in which Heloise resolutely turned from the subject of tragic love to the minutiae of monastic observance. For modern readers the correspondence may lapse from titillation into tedium with this epistle. But Abelard was no doubt immensely relieved. Laying aside her griefs, Heloise now wrote to him as abbess to abbot, asking only two things: a treatise explaining ‘how the order of nuns began,’ and a monastic rule suitable for her nuns at the Paraclete. Although they were already observing the Benedictine Rule, she complained that as this rule ‘was clearly written for men alone, it can only be fully obeyed by men,’ because it is not fair to lay ‘the same yoke of monastic ordinance on the weaker sex as on the stronger.’ Heloise went on to specify several concrete areas of concern, such as the use of meat and wine, the dangers of hospitality, the practice of manual labor, and the liturgical role assigned to the abbot. To underline her point, she even observed that the regulation underwear prescribed in the Benedictine Rule was not suitable for women, because ‘the monthly purging of their superfluous humours must avoid such things.’

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