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The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages By Clarissa W. Atkinson. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1991. Pp. xiv, 274. $24.95.) Early in this impressive book, Clarissa Atkinson reminds us of the exemplary case of the young North African matron, mother, and martyr, Perpetua. Writing her own account of the events preceding her death, at the very beginning of the third century, she rejected her father's appeal to her familial and maternal ties the proud insistence that the only name by which she would identify herself was the name of "Christian." For Perpetua and her companion, Felicitas, who went to the arena fresh from childbirth, motherhood was "neither an obstacle nor an avenue" to holiness, to the martyrdom by which they proclaimed their Christian identity and sacred vocation. When the present study reaches its end, in the early modern centuries, motherhood itself had come to define the "good" Christian woman. For both Protestants and Catholics, "women's reproductive labor served both God and man; developing ideologies idealized and enforced such service." To discover how and why these and earlier ideologies came to share in the "construction" of Christian motherhood is the central purpose of an inquiry that belongs, as its author carefully notes, more to the history of ideas than to social history. In her excavations of motherhood's "vast buried history," she is by no means inattentive to the "real," that is, biological mothers o appear, at times significantly, often fleetingly, in the pages of this book. They appear most actively as the late medieval "mothers of love and tears" whose saintly achievements contributed to a major reshaping of Christian motherhood. With these and similar exceptions, however, this artifact of history and ideology was largely the creation of men rather than the work of mothers themselves. Its ideologies were formed and reformed in a world controlled, broadly speaking by fathers, a world whose religious and intellectual Life, during much of this period, was dominated by the celibate men who powerfully influenced successive phases in the Christian construction of motherhood. Assembling the building-blocks of the new "institution" in its diverse ancient contexts, Atkinson's early chapters focus on the challenges that Christian mothers offered to, and encountered in, traditional social and physiological views of motherhood. To ancient notions of modernity as women's sole or primary claim to status and significance, early Christian women such as Perpetua opposed a conviction that motherhood was essentially irrelevant to their spiritual aspirations. Challenging these aspirations in more complicated ways were the sometimes conflicting, chiefly male notions of physical motherhood and, more generally, of women's bodies, and the meanings of sex and gender, propagated in the works of ancient and medieval science and medicine. Often stressing female inferiority, learned writers might well convey ideas of maternity supporting the incompatibility of "health" and "holiness." Holiness was, in any case, the goal strongly stressed by the exaltation of virginity and spiritual motherhood that marked the new ideology most vigorously fostered by the dominant monastic life and culture of the early Middle Ages. In spiritual motherhood, the only religious leadership open to women, as Atkinson notes, the term "mother," transformed, retained its ancient power. Its early representatives, commonly virgin abbesses of women's monasteries, displaced the physical mothers to whose often precarious fortunes during these centuries we have a singular witness in the manual of advice composed by the ninth-century Frankish noblewoman, Dhuoda, for her young son. Uniquely joining virginity and maternity, the changing images of the Virgin Mary introduce the next phase in the remodeling of motherhood, which Atkinson explores in a perceptive analysis of the stages in the theological, and popular, construction of the Mother of God. …

Background: No longer commonly regarded as a work written after Abelard’s condemnation at the council of Sens, now dated 25–26 May 1141, this letter, like Abelard’s Apologia, has been more securely assigned by Charles S.F. Burnett to the period immediately preceding the council. Preserved only by its citation in the work of Abelard’s follower, Berengar of Poitiers, this is a firmly orthodox profession of faith. Without refuting specifically the charges against him, Abelard maintains that any accusations are based on distortions of his teaching.1 Abelard dealt more specifically with the charges against him in a longer profession of faith.2 Abelard defended himself and his teachings much more fully in still another ‘apology,’ also probably written before the council of Sens, of which only a fragment concerning his Trinitarian doctrine survives.3 Abelard’s vigorous and specific rejection of the heresies of Arius and Sabellius suggests that he had in mind the accusations of William of Saint-Thierry and Bernard of Clairvaux in their intensive campaign against him during 1140 and early 1141. This letter would thus seem intended to reassure Heloise of his orthodoxy at a time of accelerated opposition to his teaching.4

Background: A last remembrance of the founders at the Paraclete was the epitaph attributed to the last abbess, at their final reburial there, before the dissolution of the abbey during the upheavals of the Revolution.

Now that I have completed, as best I could, the first work you requested, it remains for me, God willing, to devote myself to fulfilling your wishes and those of your spiritual sisters regarding the other part of your request. Following its order, I must still write for you an institute or rule of your calling and send it to you, so that you may know more certainly from the written word than from custom the rule that you should follow. Relying partly on good customs and partly on the evidence of Scriptures and the support of reason, I have decided to gather all of these together, in order to decorate the spiritual temple that you are, by adorning it, so to speak, with beautiful pictures, and from many imperfect parts to complete, if I can, one small work.

Background: Bernard, the immensely influential abbot of Clairvaux and the formidable adversary of Abelard’s last years, was born at Fontaine-les-Dijon in 1090 and died at Clairvaux in 1153.1 The son of a noble Burgundian family, at twenty-one he became a monk of Citeaux, then in the early stages of its expansion as a center of reform in Benedictine monastic life. A few years later, Bernard was sent by the abbot, Stephen Harding, to found the new daughter-house at Clairvaux that was to play so important a role in the expansion of the Cistercian movement. During the schism in the Church caused by the long struggle for the papal office between Innocent II (Gregory Papareschi) and Anacletus II (Peter Pierleoni), Bernard was a most powerful supporter of Innocent’s claim. This was ultimately successful when the schism, beginning in 1130, ended with the death of Anacletus in 1138. It was during this period that the abbot of Clairvaux achieved the eminence, and the power, not only in France, but in Christendom as a whole, that he was to enjoy for the rest of his life.

Background: Since the date commonly assigned to Abelard’s death is 21 April 1142, Peter the Venerable’s first letter to Heloise was, as his apologetic words suggest, considerably belated. Besides the ever pressing and diverse duties of which he complained, his sojourn in Spain lasted from March to October 1142. His absence may well have extended into 1143, which would have delayed his learning of Abelard’s death and his response to Heloise’s own previous letter. In any case his moving, and famous, letter responding to hers was perhaps not quickly composed. Sadly, Heloise’s “kind letter” also later became a “lost letter” and with it more specific expression of the affection she had shown him both in the letter and the gifts she had sent earlier.

Background: The text of this letter, together with a study, was published in 1961 by Raymond Klibansky, who discovered it in MS Heidelberg 359, fol. 14v—15v; the text had been published still earlier by Jean Leclercq (“Etudes sur Bernard et le texte de ses ecrits,” 1953). More recently, in 2002, Constant Mews studied in detail the meeting anticipated by Abelard’s letter (“The Council of Sens [1141]: Abelard, Bernard, and the Fear of Social Upheaval”). Examining its social and political as well as its religious contexts, Mews’s study convincingly establishes the council’s date as 25 and 26 May 1141.

Four topics, I recall, make up the whole of your last letter, in which you have made very clear the distress you have suffered. First of all, you complain that my putting your name before my own in the salutation of the letter I sent you is contrary to the custom in letter-writing and even against the natural order of things. Second, you say that when I should have comforted you, I have instead added to your desolation and provoked the tears I should have dried. And you quote my request “that if the Lord deliver me into their hands, so that prevailing against me they kill me,” etc. Third, you bring up your old and unceasing complaint against God, I mean, about the circumstances of our conversion to him and the cruelty of that treacherous outrage to my body. Finally, you counter my praise of you with accusations against yourself and an urgent request that I should no longer be so presumptuous. I have decided to reply to each of these points in turn, not so much to justify myself as to instruct you and urge you to agree more willingly to what I ask, as you come to realize that it is reasonable. I hope that you will be more willing to listen to me in those matters that concern you, as you find me less to blame in my own affairs, and that you will be more hesitant to criticize me when you see that I am less deserving of reproach.

I have been greatly pleased to read your letter, from which I have learned that my visit to you was not merely a transitory one, in which I am assured not only that I was with you, but that I have never left you. That visit of mine was not, I realize, like the memory of a passing guest for the night and I have not become for you “a stranger and a pilgrim” (Gen. 23:4), but, please God, “a citizen of the holy places and a member of the household” (Ephes. 2:19). All that I said and did in that swift and fleeting visit of m ine has been embraced so firmly in your pious memory, so deeply impressed on your gracious spirit, that not only what I said very carefully, but even words perhaps carelessly spoken, have not fallen to the ground. You have paid such careful attention to everything; you have entrusted all I said and did to that tenacious memory which springs from love of truth, as if mine were great, celestial and sacrosanct utterances, as if they were the very words and works of Jesus Christ!

Background: Like Letter 9, this letter survives in a single manuscript (BnF lat. 13057). Although not precisely dated, it was very probably written not long before or, more likely, not long after 28 November 1131, a critical date in the lives of both Heloise and Abelard. This is the date of Pope Innocent II’s letter, our earliest surviving written testimony to the existence of Heloise herself and her new community, established on the site of Abelard’s oratory, and called the Paraclete. He reported in his Story of Calamities that he had granted this place to these women who had been expelled from Argenteuil two years earlier in its successful, though doubtfully valid, takeover by Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis. (For the pope’s letter, see Cartulaire de l’Abbaye du Paraclet, no. 1.1–3: the original of this charter is in the Bibliotheque municipale de Troyes, piece 31; there is a copy in the Archives de l’Aube, 24 H 1.)

Background: The letter of absolution, together with the epitaphs for Abelard and Heloise were added in the late-fifteenth or early-sixteenth century to the last page of MS T, fol. 102v, and also to Chaumont, Bibliotheque municipal, 31, fol. 245v, at the end of the fifteenth century, 2 May 1497, on the occasion of their removal from their original graves and their burial in the new church of abbess Catherine II de Courcelle. My translations of these texts are based on the editions of Charles S.F. Burnett and of Constant Mews in the appendix to “La bibliotheque du Paraclet du XIIIe siecle a la Revolution.” As Giles Constable notes in the exchange of letters between Peter the Venerable and Heloise, the distinction between letters patent and closed is stressed (Letters 2, p. 23). Peter has apparently sent the original absolution in a closed or sealed letter of which the seal was broken when it was opened. In Letter 167 [Letter 16 in this volume], Heloise asked for another sealed document containing the absolution of master Peter within an open letter to be placed in his tomb. In reply, Peter sent “written and sealed” the absolution of Peter Abelard together with a similarly “closed” grant of a trental or thirty days of prayer after her death for Heloise herself.

Background: Often misunderstood and neglected, here in its first English translation, this significant work survives, with the Problemata, in a single manuscript, Paris BnF 14511, dating from the very late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Formerly Saint-Victor MS 297, the manuscript had come to the abbey as a bequest from its late medieval owner, the scholar and early humanist, Simon de Plumetot, a notable collector of Abelardian works. The second part of the manuscript, containing these two texts, was copied for him; the first part of the manuscript includes several briefer writings by Abelard.

How lavishly the Blessed Jerome praised St. Marcella, enthusiastically approving and especially commending her zeal for study, which was entirely devoted to questions of sacred literature, your wisdom knows better than my simplicity. Demonstrating this approval in his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, he recalled in the first book: Indeed, I know how her ardor, her faith, the flame that burns in her breast, have moved her to transcend her sex, to forget about men, to sound the tympanum of the holy books, to pass over the Red Sea of this world. Certainly, when I am in Rome, she never sees me without hastening to ask me a question concerning the Scriptures. Yet she follows the Pythagorean custom and does not accept whatever I may answer as correct; authority unsupported by reason does not convince her. Instead, she investigates everything, and weighs it all in her sagacious mind, and so she makes me feel that I have not so much a pupil as a judge.1

In arousing or calming human emotions, I have found, the experiences of others are often more effective than mere words. So, after offering you some comfort when we talked together, I have decided, now that we are apart, to write you a letter of consolation about the calamities I have suffered. This should make you realize that your troubles amount to little or nothing compared with mine, and you may find them easier to bear.

Background: The first of these letters from Peter the Venerable, the letter to Pope Innocent II announcing Abelard’s reconciliation with Bernard of Clairvaux, and asking permission for him to spend the rest of his life at Cluny, was very probably written in the summer of 1141, when Abelard had stopped at Cluny on his way to Rome after the council of Sens.1 The personal qualities that distinguished him among the most prominent churchmen of this time and the affectionate friendship he showed to both Abelard and Heloise in their later life are displayed in the following letters. Reflecting what Gillian Knight well describes as “studied vagueness” and the “selective narration of events,”2 not uncommon characteristics of Peter’s correspondence, his letter is a masterpiece of minimization, aimed at the rescue of Abelard from this latest, and last, of his “calamities.” Without mentioning the council of Sens and Abelard’s condemnation there, or naming the “certain men” involved in it, Peter let its victim speak for himself as one “gravely troubled” by the attacks of these men, “who called him a heretic, a name he abhorred,” and as one seeking to “appeal to apostolic justice and take refuge in its protection.”

Scandals are necessary, necessary (Matt. 18:7) but unpleasant! So the prophet says: “Had I but wings, I cry, as a dove has wings, to fly away and find rest (Ps. 54:7).” And the Apostle wants to have done with it all and be with Christ, and another of the saints [Elias] cries: “I can bear no more; Lord, put an end to my life; I have no better right to live than my fathers” (3 Kings 19:4). This is something I now have in common with the saints, although only in what I desire and not in what I deserve. For I, too, long to be taken out of all this, overcome, I confess, by cowardice of spirit and the storm raging around me (Ps. 54:9). But I am afraid that I should not be found as well prepared to depart as I am ready.

With a visitation of God’s mercy, we have received the favor of a visit from your excellency. We rejoice, most gracious father, and we glory in the fact that your greatness should have descended to our smallness. For a visit from you is a great glory even for the greatest. Others may know what a blessing your sublime presence has conferred upon them. As for myself, I cannot put into words, or even comprehend in thought, how beneficial and delightful your coming was to me. Our abbot and our lord, on November 16 (16 kal. Decembris) last year, you celebrated here a mass in which you commended us to the Holy Spirit. You nourished our spirits in chapter with a funeral oration of divine eloquence. You gave us the body of our master and so yielded to us the distinction belonging to Cluny.

If Heloise seems at last on the very verge of liberation from her long imprisonment in the “authenticity debate,” in current scholarship the first abbess of the Paraclete has, it seems, not yet fully escaped the constraints of the correspondence.1 There are, however, at least two passages in the early letters that reveal more clearly the larger aims of her collaboration with Abelard at the Paraclete and the intentions of the new project on which they had embarked. Heloise guides us in this direction in her first letter, when she reminded Abelard of the “many important works the fathers have written to instruct, encourage, and console holy women” and reproached him for his failure to offer her and her nuns similar consolation.2 Pursuing this theme at length in his second letter to her and offering the consolation she sought, Abelard urged his “inseparable companion” to “see and understand how the Lord has fished us up from the depths of this most perilous sea by the dragnets of his mercy … as if he were preserving us for some noble purposes, … as if he were offended and aggrieved because these talents of learning that he entrusted to us were not being used for the honor of his name.”3

To introduce the theme of this essay, there are few statements more fitting than the caustic judgment of Albertus Magnus on those whom he considered the enemies of freedom in his day. Reproaching the petty obscurantism of the opponents of Aristotle's philosophy, he described these men, whose sole aim in reading books was to find something to condemn, as stagnant themselves in intellectual inertia, and seeking always to paralyze others into their own state. It was men like these, he said, who killed Socrates, and whose plots forced Aristotle to leave Athens with the words, “I shall not give the Athenians a second chance of sinning against philosophy.” In the world of learning, according to Albertus, such bitter, bilious men are like the liver in the body; “they try to inject their own bitterness into everyone else, and to prevent others from pursuing truth in the sweetness of society.”

ALTHOUGH Abelard's Story of Calamities (Historia calamitatum) has long been regarded as the most original and significant of mediaeval autobiographies, it has also remained in many ways the most perplexing and the most often misunderstood. Setting out ostensibly to console an unidentified friend by writing about the calamities he himself had suffered, Abelard surveyed in his letter the most important phases and events of his career, from his early years to what seemed to him the unparalleled series of misfortunes that formed the pattern of his later life. In the course of his "story," he told us more about himself, more deliberately, than any other Western thinker between St Augustine and Petrarch, and much, incidentally, about the world in which he moved. For these reasons, Abelard's autobiographical letter is, as Knowles remarks, "a work of the highest value for its historical, psychological and human interest," indispensable, in fact, to all students of the intellectual and spiritual life of his age. Yet at the same time, as Knowles goes on to say, the Story of Calamities presents most acutely, "as might be expected from its author's character and career, all the difficulties of interpretation which are inseparable from the autobiographical form."' How formidable these difficulties are has been strikingly demonstrated in the first really serious and sustained attempt to investigate them, the recent study of Georg Misch in his already immense and still unfinished Geschichte der Autobiographie.2 Giving to Abelard's work a central place in the history of self-revelation in the twelfth century, Misch devotes to it what may perhaps best be described as an elaborate and perceptive commentary on its content. Valuable as his insights are, however, he has, it seems, taken insufficient account of the circumstances in which the Story of Calamities was written and their relation to the earlier crises of Abelard's life. He has also left either partly or wholly unexplored a number of critical problems concerning not only the motives, structure, and functions of Abelard's autobiography, but the psychological import of his self-disclosure. It is to these problems that the present study is directed, in the hope that it may further illumine the paradoxes and the achievements of an exceedingly complex per