Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard was published in 1933 to glowing reviews. A historical novel eschewing thick description and picturesque background, it plunged the reader immediately into the lives and concerns of its medieval characters. This retelling of the love story of the twelfth-century philosopher and his learned student draws (as did a minority of its many predecessors and successors) on the Latin correspondence of the historical Abelard and Heloise. However, the Irish Waddell, one of the great pioneering female medievalists of the twentieth century, goes a good deal further, incorporating into the plot, dialogue and detail with an abundance of medieval primary sources which ground her novel in the authentic past. The narrative highlights not only the tragedy of the lovers’ separation, but, climaxing with Abelard’s conversion, demonstrates how Abelard’s redemption theology emerged out of the intensely personal drama of his relationship with Heloise.

An Annotated Edition of Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard provides these sources, referencing the most recent critical editions of primary texts and the editions which Waddell used. The most important were the letters exchanged by Abelard and Heloise in the early 1130s in which they talk about their early love affair some fifteen years earlier. The annotations identify all the major Latin primary sources of the period, from which she drew numerous details. Thus, a priest who married and forfeited his benefices, mentioned in Ivo of Chartres’s letter to Galo of Paris, becomes a minor figure glimpsed at second hand, canon law made flesh as his weeping wife faces destitution. Waddell has her fictional canon of Notre Dame, Gilles de Vannes, apply the mercy and justice which Ivo advocated as he finds the priest employment in a country school, drawing its location from an eleventh-century source. A quotation from a letter of a wandering scholar, protégé of Ebracher, Saxon Bishop of Liège, further dramatizes Ivo’s epistle.

Thoroughly at home in twelfth-century culture, Waddell weaves prayer and liturgy into the intimate texture of her characters’ daily lives and emotions. They overhear love lyrics—the historical Abelard composed songs of their romance which, Heloise said, made her the envy of women—drawn from the Carmina burana, or by the troubadour Audefroi le Bâtard, or by the anonymous troper from the St Martial music school at Limoges. They quote classical poets on whom Abelard was accused of lecturing: the satires of Juvenal and Persius, well known in the Middle Ages, as well as an ode by Horace (found in a tenth-century manuscript from Montpellier) and lines from Lucretius (cited by Mico, a ninth-century monk of St Riquier). This silent interweaving of different kinds of primary sources recurs in each chapter. Waddell the novelist refrains from referencing her research; Jennifer FitzGerald and Constant J. Mews provide the evidence.

Despite quoting or adapting the original words of her medieval predecessors, Waddell is not so much writing as re-writing the Middle Ages. Not only because Peter Abelard is subtitled “A Novel,” but because the empirical objectivity to which scholarship aspires is unattainable. Any representation of the past is inevitably constructed by the subjectivity of the modern interpreter. All of Waddell’s work assumes a cross-cultural, trans-historical humanism, the conviction that the essence of human nature persists over time and place. Her upbringing in Japan (where her father was a Presbyterian missionary) and her academic training sensitized her to cultural and historical difference, but, along with her faith, she inherited, in Norman Vance’s words, a “fundamental belief in the transferability and translatability of what matters in man and nature under God”. Peter Abelard is therefore a pioneering text of twentieth-century medievalism, incorporating authentic material from the past, while, at the same time, interpreting this same material from Waddell’s own ideological and historical position. The motivations and emotions of her characters, Heloise and Abelard, Peter the Venerable, Bernard of Clairvaux, Alberic of Rheims and the fictional Gilles de Vannes, are wholly familiar to modern readers, despite the medieval institutions and practices which determine their lives. The divine compassion of the historical Abelard’s redemptive theology translates as empathy with human suffering; the pains of these earthly creatures are foregrounded even as they, undoubting Christians, attempt to impose on their own experiences the perspective of the eternal.

The Introduction to An Annotated Edition locates Peter Abelard within the parameters of these complementary genres, historical fiction and medievalist text. It explores the context of the novel’s composition: the author’s intense identification with Heloise and Abelard; the debate about the authenticity of the twelfth-century couple’s correspondence; Waddell’s knowledge of, and commitment to, Abelard’s theology; and the impact of her novel on readers and especially on scholars. Two appendices support more extensive investigation: “Further Texts” offers Waddell’s accounts (some previously unpublished) of how her experience fused with Heloise’s; of her sources and how she used them; and of her immersion in Abelard’s theology. “Postscript” returns Waddell’s novel to its Abelardian origins, contextualizing her knowledge with the results of recent research. Waddell relied largely on core primary texts published in the nineteenth century; despite this limitation, many of her insights have been borne out by subsequent scholarship. Some errors were, of course, inevitable: writing when the chronology of Abelard’s writings was still unclear, she anachronistically placed in the mouth of her fictional character conclusions which the theologian developed much later. We can nevertheless speculate that Waddell would have made much of the recent studies, detailed in the “Postscript”, on Heloise’s family and on the library in which she may have gained her extraordinary education. Newly identified letters exchanged by two lovers, apparently a controversial twelfth-century master and his brilliant student, have been studied in depth and are accepted by many contemporary scholars as Abelard and Heloise’s correspondence in the early days of their affair, as described retrospectively by the now-separated couple. With far fewer resources at her disposal than modern researchers, Waddell grasped the tension between secular and religious elements in the Latin literary culture of the Middle Ages; in the words of her Heloise: “I know that we are living in what the Church calls fornication and uncleanness, even if to me it has burnt up heaven and earth into such a glory that I cry out to God in my adoration for it, when I should be on my knees repenting it.”

Peter Abelard’s fusion of learning and imagination is just one example of Waddell’s signature blurring of the conventional boundaries separating the academic and the creative. Her literary history, The Wandering Scholars (1927), which first brought her to public attention—and which, remarkably for an academic tome, became an instant best-seller—baffled critics by its failure to adhere to scholastic protocols such as structure of argument and clarity of focus. Its lyrical metaphors and relentless anachronistic allusions require a reading strategy quite different than that demanded by the conventional academic thesis. F. M. Powicke, soon to be appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, complained: “Scraps of Chinese poetry… incessant quotations from the poetry of all times and peoples are brought to bear upon these medieval fragments; and we are supposed to know at once what every distinct reference means.” A similar free hand is discernible in Waddell’s Latin translations, Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (1929), carefully signaled as textually authoritative and yet claiming the imaginative prerogative of the creator—one reason, perhaps, why Waddell’s versions have proved remarkably attractive to musical composers. If, at the time of their publication, her writings confused scholars and enchanted readers, they now appeal to a new generation of academics who (in their own words) resist the narrow, self-replicating confines of scholarship, committed to enlarging its parameters with diverse methodologies and registers. Waddell’s oeuvre is a prime example of critical-creative writing, evidenced by the imaginative engagement which so distinguishes The Wandering Scholars from conventional historiography and by the comprehensive primary sources on which Peter Abelard’s compelling fiction is founded.

An Annotated Edition of Helen Waddell’s Peter Abelard functions as a significant resource for academics and students interested in knowing more about how Abelard and Heloise have been interpreted in the modern era. The wide-ranging sources reproduced in the annotations encourage the student of historical fiction to examine the creative tension between historical fact and imaginative recreation; the appendices’ collateral texts and summary of contemporary research promote a deeper, wider investigation. These materials also supply students of medievalism with substantial evidence for their own analyses. Scholars exploring the intersection of learning and creative process will couple An Annotated Edition with Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars to productive effect. In addition, this volume appeals to general readers who wish to supplement Waddell’s Peter Abelard with more extensive knowledge of the environment and concerns of the real Heloise and Abelard. It raises key questions about the relationship between imaginative fiction and historical research, as well as about the capacity of a novel to explore figures from the past.

Jennifer FitzGerald taught at the School of English of Queen’s University Belfast, from 1975 to 2002. She has served as Adjunct Faculty at the Department of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University since 2002. She is the author of Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke: Irishwomen, Friends and Scholars (2012) and editor of Helen Waddell Reassessed: New Readings (2014).

Constant J. Mews joined Monash University, Australia, in 1987. Later becoming Director of its Centre for Religious Studies, he taught both history and religious studies at Monash until his retirement at the end of 2021. He has published widely on the intellectual and religious history of the medieval period, with particular attention to the twelfth century, including The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France (2008) and Abelard and Heloise (2005).

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