Making Love in the Twelfth Century

the long version

"Nine hundred years ago in Paris, a teacher and his brilliant female student fell in love and chronicled their affair in a passionate correspondence. Their 116 surviving letters, some whole and some fragmentary, are composed in eloquent, highly rhetorical Latin. Since its discovery in the late twentieth century, the Letters of Two Lovers has aroused much attention because of its extreme rarity. These letters constitute the longest correspondence by far between any two persons from the entire Middle Ages, and they are private rather tha institutional-- which means that, according to all we know about the transmission of medieval letters, they should not have survived at all. Adding to their mystery, the letters are copied anonymously in a single late fifteenth-century manuscript, although their style and range of reference place them squarely in the early twelfth century. Can this collection of correspondence be the previously lost love letters of Abelard and Heloise? And even if not, what does it tell us about the lived experience of love in the twelfth century?"--Jacket.