Heloise was nearly as well known in Paris as Abelard was. She was renowned for her learning, which was exceptional in a woman in twelfth-century France. She was only sixteen when she met Abelard, but she had already mastered the traditional liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geography and astronomy, as well as theology. She attended some of his lectures at the cathedral. Before long, Peter Abelard finally fell in love with something besides dialectic. Her uncle, Fulbert, hired him to teach her, and he moved into his house. …
