Images of Abelard and Heloise

Mews, Constant J.

doi:10.1093/0195156889.003.0002

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Certainly, non-proximate sexual practices have historical, non-digital antecedents. The torrid 12th century love affair between French historical figures Héloïse and Abélard was conducted and sustained through the exchange of hundreds of love letters following their forced separation, after which they retreated into monastic and cloistered life (Mews, 2005). Fast-forwarding several centuries, the Comstock Laws of the late 19th century passed by the US Congress constituted a spatial strategy enacted to stymie the circulation of written and visual erotica by forbidding its distribution via the US postal system.…”

Section: Spatialities and Sexualities Of Digitally Mediated Intimate mentioning

confidence: 99%

#HotForBots: Sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter

2017

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Contemporary practices of sex and intimacy are increasingly digitally mediated. In this paper, we identify two distinctly spatial effects of these mediations. First, the digital extends the spaces of sex/uality beyond the immediately proximate, simultaneously expanding the potential for non-human object choice in intimate encounters. Second, the digital intensifies the experiential fidelity of intimate encounters by folding the remote into the spatially immediate, such that non-proximate intimate relations with human subjects as well as non-human objects may feel more proximate. We articulate these effects by building on and contributing to developments in the geographies of encounter, which allows us to bring together theories and conceptual framings of intimacy, digitality and sexuality in a uniquely spatial register. These effects of extension and intensification resonate in a selection of empirical examples of digitally mediated sex/uality that we place along continuums of more-and-less human and more-and-less proximate. These continuums comprise the conceptual axes of a heuristic framework that we advance to both (i) capture particular points at which configurations of spaces, practices and subject/object choices of sex crystallize given conditions of pervasive digital mediation, and (ii) provoke further interrogations of the multiple ways in which sex, sexuality and intimacy are recast by the digital.

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Section: Spatialities and Sexualities Of Digitally Mediated Intimate mentioning

confidence: 99%

#HotForBots: Sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter

2017

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“…Claiming an alliance with Plato and Condorcet (even with the latter's associations with the French Revolution) is a better tactic than referring to Wollstonecraft, who had lost all credibility thanks to her husband William Godwin's intimate revelations after her death (she had a child out of wedlock and twice attempted suicide). In the same way, it is plausible that Christine de Pizan, who was concerned with showing that her defence of women's virtues and intellectual capacities did not entail any threat to the status quo, might not have wished to add Héloïse to her list of virtuous women: anyone who had read Héloïse's (then very popular) letters would have been aware of her refusal to marry, even when she found that she was pregnant by Abelard, and later her strong reluctance to give up her sexuality, even in the convent (Mews ). An author wishing to vindicate women's virtue, and even to argue that women should be granted the same social and political rights as men, would do well to steer clear of women who are not deemed “respectable.”…”

Section: From Socrates To the Citation Indexes: Where Did The Women Go?mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Outskirts of the Canon: The Myth of the Lone Female Philosopher, and What to Do about It

Bergès

2015

Metaphilosophy

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Women philosophers of the past, because they tended not to engage with each other much, are often perceived as isolated from ongoing philosophical dialogues. This has led-directly and indirectly-to their exclusion from courses in the history of philosophy. This article explores three ways in which we could solve this problem. The first is to create a course in early modern philosophy that focuses solely or mostly on female philosophers, using conceptual and thematic ties such as a concern for education and a focus on ethics and politics. The second is to introduce women authors as dialoguing with the usual canonical suspects: Cavendish with Hobbes, Elisabeth of Bohemia with Descartes, Masham and Astell with Locke, Conway with Leibniz, and so on. The article argues that both methods have significant shortcomings, and it suggests a third, consisting in widening the traditional approach to structuring courses in early modern philosophy.

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“…In the case of these so-called 'lost love letters', Constant Mews himself has used them in giving his own general account of the developing thought of the couple in his recent study on Abelard and Heloise, and an essay piece added by Abelard's biographer, Michael Clanchy, to a widely-selling translation of the traditional set of love 29 letters, accepts the attribution. 32 Although the majority of experts on Abelard, especially those with a philological formation, have been sceptical or hostile to Mews's theory from the beginning, the public seems to be accepting the new letters as genuine. 33 There is another reason too for pausing over the arguments that have been made and repeated publicly to link EEDA to Abelard, and it explains my concentrating, in these pages, on the detail of the philosophical parallels Mews has proposed.…”

Section: Q 4: Are There Any Negative Arguments Which Make An Attribumentioning

confidence: 99%

Lost Love Letters? A Controversy in Retrospect

Marenbon

2008

Int class trad

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XVII + 378 pp.Peter Abelard belongs to that small group of philosophers (other members include Socrates, Augustine, Boethius and Wittgenstein) whose life-stories are intimately bound up with the public perception of their philosophy. Until recently, indeed, the events of Abelard's life have tended to put his philosophical thinking into the shade. In the Middle Ages, his reputation was that either of the heretical opponent of Bernard of Clairvaux, condemned by the Council of Sens, or of the lover of Heloise. The first edition of his writings (1616) centred on his autobiographical Historia Calamitatum, the correspondence with Heloise that ensued and the works he wrote for her; and, although from the early nineteenth-century, there were some scholarly sceptics who doubted the authenticity of the correspondence, the fantasies woven from these texts by poets and novelists from Alexander Pope to Helen Waddell fixed Abelard's popular image. Only with the complete edition of his logical works (his masterly Dialectica was not published in full until 1956) 1 and the careful analysis of his sophisticated arguments in them has Abelard's power, breadth and originality as a philosopher begun to be visible through this romantic fog. Although most specialists now accept the letters between Abelard and Heloise as genuine, they attempt to interpret them according to the conventions of medieval letter-writing and in the light of Abelard's other writings, so that an understanding of his life-story is able to illuminate his thinking, rather than over-shadow it.

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Images of Abelard and Heloise

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

#HotForBots: Sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter

#HotForBots: Sex, the non-human and digitally mediated spaces of intimate encounter

On the Outskirts of the Canon: The Myth of the Lone Female Philosopher, and What to Do about It

Lost Love Letters? A Controversy in Retrospect

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