The Other Story of Abelard and Heloise

I don't generally link to blogs outside Zenobia's time or place, but I'll just dip my toe in Medieval Europe, if I may, and ring the bell for this book review by Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon:

Abelard and Heloise is normally told as a great love story, a sort of medieval Romeo and Juliet. But there was much more to the story - Abelard was a rebel, and perhaps surprisingly a proponent of women’s ordination, at least in some forms.

This story is told in Gary Macy’s The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West.

... Abelard was far from alone in this in his time, but by the end of the 12th century, the memory of women’s ordination was being written out of church history.

Read the rest at The Other Story of Abelard and Heloise.


Slow blogging at the moment, not only because of summer lethargy, but I've been busy at the Third International Colloquium of Egyptology at Montepulciano, "Artists and Painting in Ancient Egypt". The colloquium began, of course, with a tasting of local products and the famed Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, but then it was serious stuff with wonderful lectures organized by Francesco Tiradritti, native son of that Tuscan hill town. Well worth noting on the international calendar! Tomorrow, back to Zenobia.