A History of the Wife by Marilyn Yalom Page A

of female worth. At the top are the virgins harvesting numerous sheaves of wheat. In the middle are the widows with lesser crops. And at the bottom are wives with their husbands, reaping minimal rewards. 16
    It is hard for us today to imagine the extent to which the ideal of chastity was glorified and spread among the faithful. Just as we are bombarded by commercial images proclaiming the value of sexual activity, so too medieval Christians were surrounded by model images of famous ascetics. Lives of the saints, sung or recited to illiterate audi- ences, extolled those who had taken vows of chastity. One of the first examples written in Old French, the Life of Saint Alexius (circa 1050), made this point explicit: the protagonist’s ascension to sainthood began when he abandoned his wife on their wedding night and fled to live in poverty. 17 The moral for men was clear: it was better to leave your wife and live ascetically than to be a devoted husband. Similarly, female
    saints who refused to marry or who abandoned their offspring for the religious life were highly praised. Most female saints were virgins, often martyred for resisting rape despite torture and the threat of death.
    The sculptures adorning the many new churches that sprang up after 1100 glorified martyred saints, displaying their wounds or hold- ing their decapitated heads in their hands. Couples were less in evi- dence, except for the notorious case of Adam and Eve. A medieval girl and boy, looking up at their images, would have been reminded that they, too, even in marriage, were capable of the sins of the first human couple. If they wanted to be more certain of salvation, it was better to enter a convent or monastery.
    Members of the clergy, living within the church close or in monas- teries, were not supposed to marry or have concubines or engage in any sexual activity. The church had been trying to enforce sexual purity for the clergy ever since the Council of Nicaea in 325. Pope Leo IX condemned clerical marriage in 1049, and further Lateran councils in the early twelfth century pronounced priestly orders an impedi- ment to marriage, and vice versa. But in the early Middle Ages, a sig- nificant number of priests still lived with concubines—an arrangement generally accepted by their parishioners—and some priests were even officially married, despite the knowledge that mar- riage would prevent their rise upward in the hierarchy of the church. We know from the letters of Héloïse and the famous cleric Abelard that they were married in church, in the presence of a canon and sev- eral witnesses. While the personnages in question were exceptional in so many ways, their letters written long after their marriage attest to sex and love among the clergy and the pressures brought to bear upon a cleric and his wife.

    THE STORY OF HÉLOÏSE AND ABELARD
    The history of Héloïse and Abelard, nine hundred years old, still has the shock value of a romance– cum–horror story; yet, according to our best evidence, it is a true story. 18 Abelard was an eldest son who renounced his rights of primogeniture for the sake of study. He soon rivaled all the other peripatetic practioners of philosophy, becoming famous in his twenties both for his public discourses and his good looks. By his early thirties, he was a master of theology. It was during
    his Parisian residence, when he was thirty-seven years old, that he met Héloïse. She was probably fifteen.
    In the letter known as “The Story of My Misfortunes,” written in Latin and widely circulated among his contemporaries, Abelard recalled the beginnings of their liaison:

    There was in the city of Paris a very young woman named Héloïse, the niece of a canon named Fulbert. He cherished her to the greatest degree and put all his zeal into pushing her as far as possible in the study of every science. . . . The rarity of literary knowledge among women added even more to the value of this young woman and made her