Here’s a question that has been puzzling me for many years.
Was Abelard’s cooling towards Heloise due to his castration? Was it because, chemically, he was no longer the man that had loved her so passionately? From the tone of his letters, fifteen years after the event, it sounds as though he can no longer even understand what had driven him to such passion whereas poor Heloise remembers it all too well.
Are there any medieval scholars out there who could enlighten me? I assume this is a well-known speculation and therefore that there must be well-known opinions on the matter.
This post first appeared on my writing blog but no-one there seemed to know the answer. I'm hoping WND readers will be more erudite :-)
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