1. Betty Radice, trans., revised by M. T. Clanchy, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 51.
2. Peter Dronke, Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1976), pp. 16–22.
3. “In your mother superior you have guidance which can be adequate for you to all purposes, namely, to exemplify virtues as well as to learn scholarship. Grounded not only in Latin but also in Hebrew as well as in Greek texts, she alone in this age seems to have acquired expertise in the three sacred languages.” Jan M. Ziolkowski, ed. and trans., Letters of Peter Abelard, beyond the Personal (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), p. 28.
4. For a philological analysis that disputes Mews’s claims, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Lost and Not Yet Found: Heloise, Abelard, and the Epistolae Duorum Amantium,” Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (2004), 171–202.
5. It is not unusual that such a letter would reach Heloise. During the Middle Ages, letters were, as John Van Engen points out, public or semipublic communications, often read out loud and used to compile the thought and “even the self-consciousness or inner spirit” of a person. See John Van Engen, “Letters, Schools, and Written Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Dialektik und Rhetorik im früheren und hohen Mittelalter, ed. Johannes Fried (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997), p. 104.