Abstract

The public, dramatic, and eventually calamitous love affair of Abelard and Heloise must have had a powerful effect on their contemporaries. In one form or another, the story was known far and wide. While he was still in a position to joke about it, Abelard himself made humorous references about his “amica” in the lectures he prepared for his students. After his castration he was the subject of a taunting and probably widely circulated letter by his former teacher Roscelin, as well as of a more sympathetic letter of “consolation” by his fellow monk, Fulk of Deuil. At some unknown time an anonymous poet linked Abelard's castration to that of a Count Mathias, who suffered a similar fate because of a charge of adultery.