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Historic Love and Marriages From Hell

Khalid Elhassan September 22, 2020 31 min

Jerry Lee Lewis - Myra Gale Brown — Jerry Lee Lewis and his child bride, back home after a disastrous overseas trip. The Commercial Appeal

32. Medieval Star-Crossed Love

Heloise and Abelard, by Jean Baptiste Goyet. Imgur

Romeo and Juliet might have had the world’s most star-crossed love affair. However, they are fictional characters, conceived in the imagination of William Shakespeare and brought to life by his quill. For real-life star-crossed love, the most famous is probably that of Heloise and Abelard, two medieval scholars whose romance ended as painfully – especially for him – as it gets.

Peter Abelard (1079 – 1142) was born into minor French nobility in Brittany. From an early age, he exhibited a love of learning that marked him for a life of scholarship. His father encouraged him to study the liberal arts, and by his early 20s, Abelard was famous for his debating skills, particularly in philosophy. Like some super smart people, however, he also gained a reputation for arrogance.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.