Heloise c. 1100 – 1164

Heloise of Argenteuil was a 12th-century French nun, abbess, and philosopher, one of the most learned women of medieval Europe and an important early voice in the medieval Latin philosophical tradition. Her surviving Latin letters to her former lover and husband, the philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard, are masterpieces of Latin epistolary prose and develop a distinctive ethics of intention, friendship, and the relation of love to virtue. She entered religious life after a clandestine marriage to Abelard and his subsequent castration by her uncle's hired men, and rose to become the abbess of the Paraclete, an abbey she helped to organise according to standards she considered superior to existing rules. Her writings remained influential in medieval Latin learning and in subsequent humanist thought. Her tragic life and her philosophical voice have been continuously studied since the 19th century.