To be sure, Abelard wasn't just Heloise's suitor; he was also one of the most notable philosophers of his day. But as anybody who has tried to slog through his theological arguments can attest, they no longer raise many eyebrows. Theories that got him condemned for heresy in his own century -- about the relative power of each member of the Trinity -- are not what nail us to our seats today. Try as an admirable scholar like Mews might to render these disputes colorful -- and try as Abelard himself did to formulate them for posterity -- "what will survive" of Abelard, to borrow Philip Larkin's line, "is love."

And what a love it was. Until recently, we could read it directly only in eight letters discovered in the 13th century and composed long after the lovers' entry into monastic life. The first, from Abelard, isn't even directed to Heloise. Written for an unnamed monk, it's what a medieval reader would have called a "letter of consolation," meant to comfort a troubled friend by convincing him that your problems are greater than his. This early variant of schadenfreude, the so-called "Historia Calamitatum," is how we learn of Abelard's first arrival in Paris, of his growing renown as a teacher and his encounter with the well-educated young Heloise. Here too we learn of Abelard's rash decision to move into her uncle Fulbert's home and become her tutor, of their love and her pregnancy, of Fulbert's rage, Abelard's attempt to pacify him by proposing marriage and Heloise's resistance -- at least in part because of the damage it would do to her lover's reputation. We learn that Abelard prevailed over his pupil, that the wedding was initially kept secret and that Fulbert ordered a terrible act of vengeance. Days after thugs broke into Abelard's bedroom at night and castrated him, the newlyweds took vows of celibacy and repaired to their respective religious institutions.

The letters written after the "Historia Calamitatum" are the richest, containing the rash, ringing, reckless and altogether impious declarations of love for which Heloise will always be known. Here is a voice that refuses to stay in the Middle Ages; it reaches through the centuries and catches us at the throat. "Men call me chaste," she writes. "They do not know the hypocrite I am." Even during the celebration of Mass, she confesses, "lewd visions" of the pleasures she shared with Abelard "take such a hold upon my unhappy soul that my thoughts are on their wantonness instead of on prayers. I should be groaning over the sins I have committed, but I can only sigh for what I have lost." She asserts the primacy of desire, boldly professing the amorous, sacrilegious motives that drove her into the convent: "It was not any sense of vocation which brought me as a young girl to accept the austerities of the cloister, but your bidding alone. . . . I can expect no reward for this from God, for it is certain that I have done nothing as yet for love of him. . . . I would have had no hesitation, God knows, in following you or going ahead at your bidding to the flames of hell." Her bravado, her defiance, her ruthless honesty and her apotheosis of eros over morality are everywhere apparent -- and still today they are shocking.

Love is Heloise's religion, even when she's wrapped in the robes of a nun. And in the practice of this religion, she is as uncompromising as she is unconventional. For her, love has no business with the law or money or social safety nets. It is for this reason, more than any other, that she opposes Abelard's desire to wed: "I never sought anything in you except yourself. . . . I looked for no marriage bond." Indeed, she proclaims,"if Augustus, emperor of the whole world, saw fit to honor me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess forever, it would be dearer and more honorable to me to be called not his empress, but your whore."

The dust will not settle on such words. At once intrepid and idealistic, transgressive and submissive, taboo-busting and sweet-natured, noble and naughty, they have seduced scholars for centuries. This woman, this prioress, who was prepared to sacrifice not just earthly reputation but heavenly salvation for the sake of her secular love, is a literary original. Petrarch couldn't read her without scribbling exclamations in the margins; the three letters to Abelard that have come down to us from her monastic confinement have sufficed to make her name as a writer.