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.
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