Stealing Heaven — Marion Meade

This fiction is based on fact: the 12th century love letters of the novel's main character, Heloise, the most brilliant and learned woman of Christian Europe who, at the age of 17, fell in love with her tutor, Peter Abelard. A celebrated philosopher, he was considered a cleric and forbidden to wed. Nevertheless they married clandestinely and Heloise secretly bore him a child. Discovered, they were forcibly separated and Abelard viciously punished by castration. Both then devoted themselves to contemplative lives. He became a monk and established a religious order; she founded a great convent, The Paraclete.