A careful reading of Heloise's letters reveals both her contribution to Abelard's ethical thought and the differences between her ethical concerns and his. In her letters, Heloise focuses on the innate moral qualities of the inner person or animus. Hypocrisy—the misrepresentation of the inner person through false outer appearance, exemplified by the potentially deceitful religious habit or habitus—is a matter of great moral concern to her. When Abelard responds to Heloise's ideas, first in his letters to her and later in his Collationes and Scito te ipsum, he turns the discussion away from her original interests. He transforms her metaphor of the habitus as false appearance into a discussion of another type of habitus, the habitual process of acquiring virtue, and integrates her focus on the animus into his developing ideas about sin as intention. Examining the differences between Heloise's ethical thought and Abelard's allows us to appreciate the distinct contributions of both.
Guillaume de Machaut's Voir Dit (c. 1364) stages a young woman's poetic apprenticeship and quotes poems and letters said to have been written by her. Although works by Machaut's contemporary Deschamps identify this woman as a certain Peronne, her status as an historical figure remains problematic. This essay revisits the passages in which Machaut and Deschamps name Peronne, and shows that such moments of naming provide the male poet with an occasion to define and name himself, establishing his identity in counterpoint to that of the woman he addresses. Although information about Peronne remains elusive, Machaut's and Deschamps' use of her in their texts testifies both to the importance they accorded to women's amateur literary activity, and to the trepidation with which they sometimes regarded it.
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