The Marriage of a Cleric and Canon in Twelfth-Century Paris: Heloise, Abelard, and the Evolution of Clerical Celibacy

When Heloise initially refused Abelard’s proposed marriage in the early years of the twelfth century, she professed to prefer the terms “friend” and even “concubine” or “whore” to the language of “wife.” Over the centuries, Heloise’s seemingly shocking profession has furnished the basis for romanticized notions of her gendered and sexualized self-sacrifice to Abelard. This paper revisits Heloise’s language, placing it within the context of debates concerning clerical marriage during the period. As Heloise herself noted, Abelard was a “cleric” and a “canon” when they married—two categories of churchman that, by the late eleventh century, increasingly featured in reforming attempts to eradicate clerical marriage. Although Abelard ignores legal considerations in his presentation of the marriage in his Historia calamitatum, the marriage of clerics generally was controversial in northern France around the time of his relationship with Heloise. Abelard’s selective account of his marriage to Heloise, combined with a scholarly tendency to place a narrow emphasis on the marriage of “priests” (rather than attending to the more capacious language that reformers used to discuss clerical marriage), has resulted in an understanding of their marriage as something distinct from the broader reforming landscape of the period. By refocusing our attention on the larger ecclesiastical and canon law context, this paper adds to our understanding of evolving ideas concerning clerical marriage before the rulings of the Second Lateran Council (1139), and of Heloise and Abelard’s experience as a married, clerical couple.