Proving woman: From Heloise to Heloisian an examination of the authenticity debate surrounding the letters of Heloise of the Paraclete

This thesis examines and resists the tendency for a total subsumption of the identity of Heloise of the Paraclete, the 12th century abbess perhaps best known today for her tempestuous affair with Peter Abelard, within and under his identity. The authenticity debate surrounding the three letters addressed to Abelard from Heloise dated around 1132/1133 erases both the historical woman and her writings. Forgery claims made by scholars from 1975 onward postulate that the letters were forged by either Abelard himself or anonymous male imposters. One the one hand, it is by subsuming the historical woman underneath the created literary fiction of the romantic heroine that antifeminist scholars are able to argue for forgery. On the other hand, I resist the claims of scholars who wish to reclaim the historical woman for feminist discourse by purporting to reach the "real" inner life of Heloise, a move I view to be epistemologically unsound. Thus, after reviewing the process by which the historical woman came to be crowned la grande amoureuse of bourgeois literary imagination, I attempt to replace this problematically positivist conception of objectivity in historical research with a performative account of subject-object relations. This queer performative lens allows the radically affirming feminism of this remarkable 12th century woman to come into view.