She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius. She is famous in history and popular culture for her love affair and correspondence with the leading medieval logician and theologian Peter Abelard , who became her colleague, collaborator, and husband. She is known for exerting critical intellectual influence upon his work and posing many challenging questions to him such as those in the Problemata Heloissae.
Her surviving letters are considered a foundation of French and European literature and primary inspiration for the practice of courtly love. Her erudite and sometimes erotically charged correspondence is the Latin basis for the bildungsroman genre and serve alongside Abelard's Historia Calamitatum as a model of the classical epistolary genre.
She is an important figure in the establishment of women's representation in scholarship and is known for her controversial portrayals of gender and marriage which influenced the development of modern feminism. Her letters critically develop an ethical philosophy in which intent is centrally placed as critical for determining the moral correctness or "sin" of an action. She claims: "For it is not the deed itself but the intention of the doer that makes the sin.
Equity weighs not what is done, but the spirit in which it is done. She describes her love as "innocent" yet paradoxically "guilty" of having caused a punishment Abelard's castration.
She refuses to repent of her so-called sins, insisting that God had punished her only after she was married and had already moved away from so-called "sin". Heloise apparently preferred what she perceived as the honesty of sex work to what she perceived as the hypocrisy of marriage: "If the name of wife seems holier and more impressive, to my ears the name of mistress always sounded sweeter or, if you are not ashamed of it, the name of concubine or whore God is my witness, if Augustus, who ruled over the whole earth, should have thought me worthy of the honor of marriage and made me ruler of all the world forever, it would have seemed sweeter and more honorable to me to be called your mistress than his empress" [ 10 ] The Latin word she chose now rendered as "whore", scortum from "scrotum" is curiously in medieval usage a term for male prostitute or "rent boy".
