ABSTRACT
As other essays in this volume reveal, there was a revolution in thinking about the nature of emotions, their functioning in the human person, and their role in the relationship between the individual soul and God taking place in twelfth-century monastic and early scholastic culture. These ideas, often focused on the terms affectus and affectio, are evident amongst the Victorines (Michael Barbezat), the Cistercians (Constant J. Mews), and female-centric monastic culture (Barbara Newman). Yet in this same period, the highly influential philosopher and theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142), and Heloise, his former student, long-term intellectual colleague, and abbess of the Convent of the Paraclete (d. 1164), show themselves less moved by this new thinking on emotions, and more indebted to Augustinian ideas of affectus based in the will as disposition, intention, or inclination. 1 Ineke van ‘t Spijker has argued that although Heloise and Abelard are ‘both associated with an “inward turn,”’
theirs is not the inwardness that we find in the Victorines, where the homo interior is architecturally modelled after, for example, the Ark of Noah; nor is the emphasis […] on the inner man as reflecting his place within a comprehensive cosmology. It is also unlike the affective interiority that we find in Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry […] associated not only with inwardness, but also with an increasingly affective devotion—and with experience. Experience, thus, is primarily associated with feeling [affectus]. It is often contrasted with (discursive) thinking, which both Abelard and Heloise exercise in their works. 2
