The story of Abelard and Heloise is normally told as a great love story, a sort of medieval Romeo and Juliet. But there was much more to the story - Abelard was a rebel, and perhaps surprisingly a proponent of women's ordination, at least in some forms.

The story is told in Gary Macy's The Hidden History of Women's Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. As that title suggests, Macy finds plenty of evidence that at least before the turn of the millennium, the ordination of women was generally not particularly remarkable in the church, although ordination was — for both men and women — a less defined rite, something that formally placed an individual in a position, rather than an institutional rule and ladder.

It was Abelard's much-hated teacher Anselm, the most celebrated scholar at the School of Laon, who was running a line that would completely remove women from ordained ministry, restricting true ordination to priests and deacons, and arguing that there were no true women deaconesses in the scripture, and only heretics had allowed them.

Macy says that Abelard was consistently and vehemently opposed to that position, writing, for example, in response to Heloise's request for a history of the ordo of holy women, which, Macy suggests, may have been "a cry for defense of women's orders in the high Middle Ages". In this work, Aberlard "argues that this ordo was established by Jesus himself and not by the apostles, specifically rejecting the teaching that only the male priesthood and diaconate were part of the original church. Further, this ordo predates even the Lord in the great Jewish women of Hebrew scripture, and in Anna and in Elizabeth, whom Abelard dramatically described as prophets to the prophets."

Macy adds that both Heloise and Abelard asserted that the title abbess was the new name for the ancient order of deaconesses.

And, Macy adds, Abelard was far from alone in this in his time, but by the end of the 12th century, the memory of women's ordination was being written out of church history. One of the early proponents of the "it never happened" school was Rufinus, writing between 1157 and 1159, who defined "real ordination" as ordination to the altar and everything else as mere commissioning to a job. Consequently, Macy concludes: "In one of the most successful propaganda efforts ever launched, a majority of Christians came to accept that ordination had always been limited to the priesthood and the diaconate and that women had never served in either ministry".

In reaching this point, Macy has been able to recover just a few women from this great coverup, and a little about their circumstances. Hildeburga, the wife of Segenfrid, bishop of Le Mans from 963-996, is remembered because a later writer treated her husband disparagingly because he married and bequeathed a large portion of church property to his son. (But since churches were hereditary in the period, this was probably no big deal at the time.)