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24.10.17 Cook, Brenda M. Astralabe: The Life and Times of the Son of Heloise and Abelard.

24.10.17 Cook, Brenda M. Astralabe: The Life and Times of the Son of Heloise and Abelard.


How does one escape celebrity parents? This was the challenge faced by Astralabe, forever remembered as the offspring of an illicit love affair, reported in detail by Peter Abelard in the Historia calamitatum. Most accounts of his relationship with Heloise mention their child only in passing. The most that might be said is that Abelard composed for his instruction the Carmen ad Astralabium, a didactic poem recently re-edited and translated by Juanita Feros Ruys within The Repentant Abelard. Family, Gender and Ethics in Peter Abelard’s “Carmen ad Astralabium” and “Planctus,” published in 2014 in the same series as this new volume by Brenda M. Cook. This neglect makes it all the more remarkable that Brenda Cook should produce a volume of over four hundred pages about a figure known through only a few details. Apart from scattered references by Abelard, Heloise, and Peter the Venerable, we know only from a charter of the Cistercian abbey of Busay (also known as Buzay) that a canon of Nantes was called Astralabe, and that an Astralabe is recorded as the fourth abbot of Hauterive, a Cistercian abbey near Fribourg in Switzerland, between 1162 and 1165. The only other twelfth-century allusion to that name occurs within a fable included within the Middle High German Kaiserchronik, from mid-twelfth-century Regensberg in which a certain Astrolabius has to be saved from falling in love with a statue of Venus--an episode that Cook convincingly argues adapts a familiar story so as to allude to Abelard’s being caught by lust for Heloise. Cook’s major focus, however, is on the way Astralabe’s career was shaped by dynastic politics in the region of Nantes and Brittany as well as by the dramatic expansion of the Cistercian Order across Europe during these decades.

It might seem counter-intuitive to think that the child of Abelard and Heloise should have chosen to join the Cistercian Order, given the known hostility of Bernard of Clairvaux to the peripatetic of Le Pallet. Cook’s monograph is important for helping us to break down artificial divisions between admirers and critics of the Cistercian Order. The limitations of the surviving evidence are such that it is often easier for a novelist to imagine what might have happened than for a historian to confine herself to what can be said, with prudent recognition of what might be possible. With a remarkable command of twelfth-century regional politics, Cook walks a fine line between these two extremes.

The first part of Cook’s monograph deals with the frequently re-told story of the affair of Abelard and Heloise. She observes that the name Heloise chose for her child, an instrument for observing the heavens, itself reflects their fondness for celestial learning. Less convincing is her suggestion, based on an unsubstantiated claim made by Papire Masson in the sixteenth century, that Heloise might have been the daughter of an otherwise unidentified canon of Notre-Dame called John. Yet she also acknowledges another possibility, raised by Werner Robl from a coincidence of death-dates, that Heloise’s mother, Hersende, was the same person as the Hersende of Champagne (related to the Montmorency family, guardians of Argenteuil), as helped Robert of Arbrissel establish the abbey of Fontevraud on her property.

Cook’s analysis becomes firmer when she examines the borderland character of Le Pallet and the Nantais region on the border between Brittany and the Poitou, from which Abelard’s family (of mixed Poitevin and Breton background) came and within which the young Astralabe was raised. She rightly observes Abelard’s strong links to his family, illustrated by his dedicating the Dialectica for the education of the sons of his brother, Dagobert (written more likely around when he had returned to his home regions c.1112/13 than c.1123, as claimed by Cook at 75 and 95). She picks up on the coincidence that Abelard’s father and then mother chose to enter religious life in 1112 at the same time as the Duke of Brittany, Alain IV Fergant (c.1063-1119) became a monk at Redon. His wife, the formidable Ermengard of Anjou (c.1068-1147), was never formally enclosed as a nun, but became a major patron of religious reform through her support of Robert of Arbrissel at Fontevraud, and subsequently of various Cistercian foundations in the region. She may well have influenced Abelard’s appointment to St Gildas c. 1127, a position he technically held until his death in 1142, even if in practice he had abandoned the abbey by the early 1130s. One of Ermengard’s foundations was Busay (Buzay), founded by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1135 at her request. Cook unravels the significance of a charter of that abbey (where Bernard’s brother, Nivard, was prior) that mentions both Astralabe and his uncle, Porchaire (a Poitevin name), who was a canon of Nantes, but became a monk at Busay, probably after Bernard’s second visit to Nantes in 1143. She suggests that Astralabe was groomed by his uncle to take over his canonry at the cathedral, possibly becoming its precentor.

Cook’s analysis of the foundation of Busay helps explain not just the subsequent evolution of Astralabe’s career, but also Abelard’s detailed knowledge of Cistercian liturgical reforms, evident in a harshly critical letter that he sent to Bernard of Clairvaux after the abbot had visited Heloise at the Paraclete. Abelard and Heloise may have been critical of individual Cistercian practices, but they shared with the Cistercians a common interest in retrieving authenticity in monastic observance. This is illustrated by the fact, uncovered by the late Chrysogonus Waddell, that the Paraclete liturgy combined Cistercian hymns and practices with those devised by Abelard. Cook’s emphasis on Abelard’s brother becoming a monk in the 1140s at Busay (where Bernard’s brother was prior) provides another avenue through which Abelard and Heloise could have learned about Cistercian practice.

Cook also offers a way of understanding what might seem to be the most enigmatic aspect of Astralabe’s career, namely his decision to become a monk at Cherlieu, the motherhouse of Hauterive, where he would become its fourth abbot between 1162 and 1165. We know from a letter of Peter the Venerable that in around 1143 that Heloise wanted Astralabe to find a position closer to the Paraclete. This did not happen. Cook suggests that Astralabe’s familiarity with Cistercian practice would have been encouraged not just by Porchaire, but by Bernard of Escoublac, a former dean of the cathedral who became a monk at Clairvaux before becoming bishop of Nantes between 1147 and 1169. She also argues that Astralabe’s decision to leave Nantes may have been encouraged by the rebellion of the city, encouraged by its bishop, against the authority of Count Hoël and its shifting loyalty to Henry II, duke of Anjou and king of England. She argues that these events prompted Astralabe’s decision to leave Nantes and become a monk in a far distant abbey. Her analysis of the documentation from Hauterive about their fourth abbot, with this unusual name, is meticulous. Given the close personal connections between Nantes, Clairvaux, and Busay, it is quite possible that Astralabe chose to become a monk at Cherlieu at the invitation of Guy, its abbot between 1131 and 1158. She suggests that their common ground was music. Guy had been entrusted by Bernard of Clairvaux with reforming Cistercian chant within the Order during the 1140s. Through these connections, Astralabe somehow made contact with the Abbot of Cherlieu, and came to that abbey before going to its daughter house in Hauterive.

Perhaps the one detail in Cook’s argument where specialists may disagree relates to the identity of the abbot with whom Astralabe must have made contact: Guy, a monk of Clairvaux, who became abbot of Cherlieu 1131-58 and was the leading theorist of chant in the Cistercian Order. While Cook accepts a nineteenth-century claim that the Abbot of Cherlieu was from a Burgundian family (of Durnes), Claire Maître finds no support for this in her meticulous 1995 study of Guy’s Regulae de arte musica. Dismissing Guy’s link to Durnes clears the way for identifying the Abbot of Cherlieu with Guy of Eu (Guido Augensis), identified in the Cistercian Tonale as author of these Regulae. Guy exerted huge influence across the Order through his teaching on chant. (A small detail, not mentioned by Cook, that provides further evidence for a connection between Abelard and Cistercian chant is that Guy introduced the term maneriae to describe four core types of chant, a neologism that Abelard uses in his dialectic to refer to a subset of species.) Not the least intriguing part of Cook’s analysis is that she introduces into her story the discovery that the earliest surviving copy of the Cistercian Antiphonary, along with introductions by Bernard and Guy was produced at Hauterive in the early 1160s, precisely when Astralabe was its abbot. David Wulstan edits that manuscript, now at Mount Melleray in Ireland, in The Letter of St. Bernard and The Tract on the Cistercian Revision of the Antiphoner (Lion’s Bay: Institute of Medieval Music, 2015), suggesting that Astralabe might have been involved in transmitting its teaching. While Cook does not get involved in musicological issues, she raises the intriguing possibility that it was through interest in music (and perhaps the suggestion of Heloise) that Astralabe, familiar with Cistercian chant through Busay and Nantes, decided to join Guy at Cherlieu. From there, he joined a daughter foundation at Hauterive rising quickly to the rank of abbot. This would have been not long after Bernard’s death in 1153, when tensions had subsided. Becoming a Cistercian at Cherlieu and then Hauterive was his way of escaping his father’s reputation.

Inevitably, the limitations of the surviving evidence mean that any historian can only propose what might seem a plausible way of explaining the evidence. Cook recognises that she is raising hypotheses about Astralabe’s career to explain the surviving evidence without being able to arrive at certainty on any of these issues. Nonetheless, she deserves to be congratulated for bringing to wider attention an unjustly neglected aspect of the story of Abelard and Heloise. In the process she tells us much of value both about regional tensions in the region of Nantes and about the expansion of the Cistercian Order in the twelfth century.