SOURCE: “Ovid and the Female Voice in the De Amore and the Letters of Abelard and Heloise,” in Modern Philology, Vol. 95, No. 1, August, 1997, pp..1-17.

In the following essay, Calabrese comments on the female characters in Ovid's works, in Capellanus's De Amore , and in the letters of the lovers Abelard and Heloise, arguing that a true expression of the female voice is absent in De Amore.

Two twelfth-century Latin works about love, the De Amore of Andreas Capellanus and the Letters of Abelard and Heloise, seem on the surface incomparable. The De Amore offers a parodic, scholastic attack on love, driven by stylized dialogues of seduction and repulse, culminating in a virulent attack on male desire and on women. The correspondence of Abelard and Heloise, by contrast, offers a love story, an epistolary narrative of happiness achieved but then violently torn from the lovers, who are thrown into...