friends

True-life romance in the 12th-century

He was a brilliant scholar at the University of Paris, charismatic, engaging, and handsome. He drew students like moths to his flame, challenging his masters as well as his peers with scintillating displays of logic. His seemingly unshakable core of self-confidence was justified by his talents for dialectic, teaching, and poetry. His name was Pierre Abelard.

She was a rare apparition in the cloister of the Paris cathedral: a young woman, still in her teens, pursuing philosophical studies with no evident desire to take the veil. Though undoubtedly lovely, she was renowned more for her keen mind and her thirst for knowledge than for her beauty. Her name was Heloise.

That two such extraordinary individuals in the same academic world should find one another seems inevitable. That their eloquent expressions of love should have survived for us in their own words is a rare gift of history.

That tragedy should await them makes their story all the more poignant.