Nine hundred years from now, will people still be telling the great and tragic love stories of our time? Just picture it: academics poring over twenty-first century news accounts of the storybook wedding and heartbreaking divorce of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Seems unlikely. Evidently, though, if you’ve got the right story, even nine intervening centuries aren’t enough to render it obsolete. Proof of this is evident in the publication of James Burge’s Heloise and Abelard: A New Biography, whose title lovers first met in the year 1115.

Those readers familiar with the story, one of the most infamous of the Middle Ages, should know all the salient details: boy meets girl, boy and girl hav...

Nine hundred years from now, will people still be telling the great and tragic love stories of our time? Just picture it: academics poring over twenty-first century news accounts of the storybook wedding and heartbreaking divorce of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. Seems unlikely. Evidently, though, if you’ve got the right story, even nine intervening centuries aren’t enough to render it obsolete. Proof of this is evident in the publication of James Burge’s Heloise and Abelard: A New Biography, whose title lovers first met in the year 1115.

Those readers familiar with the story, one of the most infamous of the Middle Ages, should know all the salient details: boy meets girl, boy and girl have torrid love affair, girl’s uncle finds out and has boy castrated, boy and girl become monk and nun. A light romantic comedy it’s not. Even more amazing than the story is the way in which it was preserved: all of our knowledge of it is based on a mere eight letters the lovers exchanged years after their initial affair, and which were discovered a century after their deaths.