Following on my profile of the life of a male university graduate , I want to profile two highly educated women of the Middle Ages, whose lives turned out quite differently.
What we know about Heloise is fairly limited. His letter to Philintus got passed on to someone who still had contact with Heloise. Heloise, agitated and now having his current address, wrote to him; they exchanged five letters.
She was probably an orphan; she may have been an oblate child who chose not to take orders. She grew up at a convent in Argenteuil, and from an early age proved a brilliant scholar.
They taught her Latin and Greek; she also learned Hebrew. We do know that she was living with Canon Fulbert when the known story begins. We assume she was very young, but on the other side, she was a famous scholar of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which takes time. She was somewhere between 18 and Heloise wanted to continue her education, but she could not enroll at the University of Paris in the s.
After years of scholarly celibacy, he suddenly wanted this particular woman. He asked Canon Fulbert if he could stay in his house and tutor niece Heloise in the remaining university subjects such as philosophy and medicine. Heloise was an unusually strong-willed, free-thinking woman.
