Abstract
In this passage of The Romance of the Rose, an allegorical epic about the nature of love, Jean de Meun (d. 1305) introduces his readers to an exchange of letters between Abelard and Heloise, very different from that discovered two centuries later by Johannes de Vepria at Clairvaux. Jean de Meun was particularly interested in Heloise’s declaration of love for Abelard in a letter that follows the Historia calamitatum, addressed to an anonymous friend. He picks out from Heloise’s letter a sentence which he reads as articulating the selflessness of her love for Abelard, that she would rather be called his prostitute (meretrix) than empress (imperatrix) of Caesar. He subsequently translated these letters (although not the Rule) into French.2
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