In 1115 Canon Fulbert, a cathedral staffer, gave some rent-free rooms to teacher/theologian Peter Abelard in exchange for his services as a tutor to the canon’s intellectually precocious niece, Héloise. She read French, Latin, and Greek; she wanted to learn Hebrew; she was interested in Abelard’s unorthodox philosophical project: to use dialectics to understand the ambiguities and contradictions of religious faith. Orthodox scholars refused the very notion of ambiguity and contradiction. Absolutism—religious, moral, political—defined the very ground of being.