A noted Latinist before she was twenty, she was married to her teacher Abelard, then separated from him and placed in a convent at his bidding. She became abbess of the Paraclete and governed the house for thirty-five years, asking him for a rule written for women rather than copied from the men's. Her letters are one of the few texts of the century in which someone refuses to call devotion what she knows to be only a bearing.
In their own words
They proclaim me chaste, those who have not detected the hypocrite.
Letter to Abelard (Epistola IV), in Petri Abaelardi opera, ed. Victor Cousin, Paris, 1849, vol. I, p. 90; Latin « Castam me praedicant, qui non deprehenderunt hypocritam », translated by the Manna team
Do not think me healed: you would withdraw from me the grace of the remedy.
Letter to Abelard (Epistola IV), in Petri Abaelardi opera, ed. Victor Cousin, Paris, 1849, vol. I, p. 90; Latin « Noli aestimare sanam, ne medicaminis subtrahas gratiam », translated by the Manna team