Heloise

Heloise of Argenteuil (c. 1100 to 1164) was a twelfth century French nun, abbess and philosopher, one of the most learned women of medieval Europe and an early voice in the medieval Latin philosophical tradition. Her surviving Latin letters to Peter Abelard, her former lover and husband, are masterpieces of epistolary prose and develop a distinctive ethics of intention, friendship and the relation of love to virtue, in which the intention of the doer rather than the deed itself decides whether an act is sinful. After her clandestine marriage to Abelard and his castration by her uncle's hired men she entered religious life, and she rose to become abbess of the Paraclete, an abbey she helped organise. Her writings influenced Abelard's own ethics of intention and have been studied continuously since the nineteenth century.