2 Prayer for the Dead: Women, Death and Salvation Fiona J. Griffiths In the second quarter of the twelfth century, the scholar-turned-monk Peter Abelard (d. 1142) wrote to his wife Heloise – now abbess of the Paraclete – addressing what was, under the circumstances, a curious set of topics: death, prayer and women. With their tumultuous affair and its disastrous conclusion behind them, Abelard had taken up his pen in response to Heloise’s plea that he offer her ‘some word of comfort’ in which she might find ‘increased strength and readiness to serve God’. 1 He answered, not with overt words of comfort or of spiritual fortification, but with a request of his own: when he died, he asked that his body be buried at Heloise’s monastery, in the community’s burial ground. Such a plan was not entirely unusual in its twelfth-century context: male patrons and monastic founders were sometimes buried in cemeteries attached to women’s religious houses, as were nuns’ priests and the lay brothers whose labours supported women’s communities. 2 However, unlike most of these men, Abelard discussed his burial plans himself, in writing, and was therefore in a position to explain his request. As he did, he made the remarkable claim that burial among nuns was spiritually optimal. Indeed, he argued that there was no place ‘more fitting for Christian burial ... than one amongst women dedicated to Christ’. 3 Abelard’s letter offers an important starting point for considerations of medieval memories and memorial practices, of the commemorative and intercessory roles of women as wives and mothers and of the social and spiritual contributions of female monasticism. By choosing to be buried at the Paraclete, Abelard entrusted his posthumous memorialisation dir- ectly and exclusively to nuns, rather than to monks or priests. The 1 Heloise, Epist. 2.16; The Letter Collection of Peter Abelard and Heloise, ed. and trans. D. Luscombe, after the translation by Betty Radice, OMT (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013), pp. 140–1. 2 According to Roberta Gilchrist, ‘burial at nunneries was less socially and sexually exclu- sive than that at male religious institutions’. R. Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 61. 3 Abelard, Epist. 3.12; The Letter Collection, pp. 154–5. 25 C(475D D# D:7 3!4%697 #%7 D7%!C #8 (C7 3)3347 3D :DD$C,***53!4%697#%95#%7D7%!C :DD$C,6##%9 .#*"#3676 8%#! :DD$C,***53!4%697#%95#%7 /3"7 07653 /4%3%+ 1D3"8#%6 2")7%CD+ 07653 7"D7% #" 17$ 3D ,,