While the development of universities was a major feature of the 12th-century Renaissance, not all learning or art was associated with universities. For example, women participated in learning and literature, despite not being allowed to attend to universities. (In fact, it's only been 100 years since one medieval university-- Oxford-- formally admitted women.) Below are some of the most famous examples of female thinkers from the period 1000-1300.

Heloise

A later, 15th-century illumination of Heloise teaching (London, British Library, Royal MS 16 F II, f. 137r)

Heloise/Héloïse (d. 1164) was a highly educated noblewoman who wrote letters and poetry. She was the niece of a canon of Notre Dame in Paris. Her uncle arranged for her to study Latin, Greek, and Hebrew by a famous scholar from the cathedral school of Paris, Peter Abelard (1079-1142). Abelard had pioneered new ideas in philosophy, logic, and theology. By the 1110s, and he acquired many pupils at the cathedral school in Notre Dame, as well as a reputation for arrogance.

Heloise's and Abelard's intellectual achievements have been overshadowed by their dramatic relationship. Heloise and Abelard had an affair and Heloise became pregnant. They called their son “Astrolabe.” (This might have been derived from the Greek for 'star-taker', or it might have been seen as a reference to the tool called an astrolabe, which contains a 2-D model of the universe and was used for making calculations and determining locations.) After Astrolabe's birth, Heloise’s uncle insisted that Abelard and Heloise marry. Heloise’s family later hired thugs to attack and castrate Abelard one night in the late 1110s. Abelard became a monk and later abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys. He faced accusations of heresy and resentment after he aggresively tried to reform the monastery.

Heloise became an abbess of the Oratory of the Paraclete. She continued to correspond with Abelard, and some of their letters survive. From their letters, we can recover some of their philosophical debates and ideas.

Hildegard von Bingen

Heloise was considered one of the greatest scholars of Greek and Hebrew of her age, but she was by no means the only outstanding female scholar. One of her contemporaries was Hildegard von Bingen (d. 1179), a Benedictine abbess and polymath. Among her many achievements, she was noted for her medical knowledge, wrote music, wrote biblical commentaries and hagiography, said she had had mystical visions since the age of 3, and created a secret language with its own alphabet.

Image above: the alphabet that Hildegard invented (Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 2, ff 461v-464v)

Image above: an illumination from one of Hildegard's most extensive works, her Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works). In it, she explained how her visions gave her insights into the natural world, the cosmos, the human soul, the nature of the winds, angels, history, eternity, etc. Note the tiny Hildegard writing in the lower left-hand part of the illumination. (Liber Divinorum Operum III.4: Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 1942, f. 135r).

Almost 400 letters that Hildegard wrote survive to this day. She wrote to-- and influenced-- a number of influential people, including Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of England and Bernard of Clairvaux.

Today, Hildegard is considered the founder of the study of natural history in Germany.

Anonymous

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Detail of the poem ‘Laudis honor’ (British Library, Add MS 24199, f. 78r)

Heloise and Hildegard are still remembered to this day. However, the names of many other female (and male) authors have not been preserved, even if their works have been. For example, in a book of poetry from the Benedictine house of Bury St Edmunds, in eastern England, there is a poem by a woman whose identity remains uncertain. (It appears that the author of the poem was female, because she describes herself using the female pronoun ‘grata’ in the second to last line.) The poem shows off its poet's learning with many allusions to Greek and Latin authors. However, the poet claims that not everyone has been impressed by her work and that she has been exiled by ignorant rulers who disapprove of her writing. She asks the muse Clio from Greek mythology to leave her as she won’t need her help any more. ‘Art is my crime, and my genius’, she laments.

Constance Mews and others have suggested that this poet was Heloise. The classical allusions echo the language of some of Heloise’s letters to her former lover, Abelard; but the writer may equally have been an anonymous female scholar who was familiar with classical texts.

The honor of praise, love of probity, pagan virtue (gentilis honestas)

How, in what way could they all perish at the same time?

Gnawing envy, idle inaction, base slander,

What good are they to the rule of the whole kingdom?

The grace of the Muses and the fountain of Pegasus

So beloved to the emperors are

Worthless to men nowadays.

Once not the least glory of the Roman people.

Virgil, Ovid lie dead as empty names.

We are expelled from the new world because our concern is writing.

Clio, faithful companion, we are driven out, leave!

Though reading [once] pleased our leaders,

Under new leaders a new law rules.

Formerly fierce hearts used to be softened by poetry,

But now weak hearts are enraged by our poems.

The poems of the poet [Ovid] earned a milder exile

And Caesar’s anger toward poetry was less.

Our writing provides a source of rage to our [rulers],

No poems now please our leaders.

I am indicted, but in fact for what foregoing misdeed?

If you want to know: art is my crime, and genius.

My lofty writing gave birth to my great crime.

Clio [faithful companion, we are driven out, leave!]

Oh new religion, holy withdrawal form life.

Now if only I knew what wickedness our writing might be.

She or he is good whose face always looks to the ground.

Who, knowing nothing, thinks she or he is good.

Yet is that existence holy to which meditating about nothing

Or knowing nothing has brought nothing to be?

If God is grasped by sense and grasped by reason

That person will grasp more in whom there is already more reason.

Much writing will not stop me from being good,

Writing allows me, not forbids me to know God.

We believe and know rationally that God exists

And also that what we do God does not forbid.

If he forbids what we do, we shall forbid what you do.

Clio [faithful companion, we are driven out, leave!]…

Your mind desired to condemn what it could not do...

Compose verses, you slanderer of verse, so that I may think

That you of course can create but do not want to.

I would be acceptable to you if my writing were acceptable:

Equal genius usually reconciles two people!

Translated by Constant Mews and Neville Chiavaroli in Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, 2nd edn (Springer, 2008), pp. 164-66