Who was Heloise?

Heloise was nearly as well known in Paris as Abelard was. She was renowned for her learning, which was exceptional in a woman in twelfth-century France. She was only sixteen when she met Abelard, but she had already mastered the traditional liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geography and astronomy, as well as theology. She attended some of his lectures at the cathedral. Before long, Peter Abelard finally fell in love with something besides …

…part in development through his incredible skill in it, dialectic, became the sole teaching method at Paris for centuries. This method came to be called Scholasticism, and it produced the greatest scholars of the Middle Ages, Albertus Magnus and his more famous student, Thomas Aquinas. The University of Paris was the greatest theology school of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, thanks in large part to the brilliant, querulous and eventually revered seigneur's son from Brittany.