More recently, it has been argued that an anonymous series of letters, the Epistolae Duorum Amantium,[8] were in fact written by Héloïse and Abelard during their initial romance (and, thus, before the later and more broadly known series of letters). This argument has been advanced by Constant J. Mews,[9] based on earlier work by Ewad Könsgen.[10] If genuine, these letters represent a significant expansion to the corpus of surviving writing by Héloïse, and thus open several new directions for further scholarship.
However, because the second set of letters is anonymous, and attribution "is of necessity based on circumstantial rather than on absolute evidence," their authorship is still a subject of debate and discussion.[11] Recently, Rüdiger Schnell has argued that a close reading reveals the letters as parody, ridiculing their supposed authors by characterizing the male writer as boastful and macho, while simultaneously humiliating himself in pursuit of his correspondent, and the female writer, ostensibly an exemplar of ideal love, as a seeker of sexual pleasure under the cover of religious vocabulary.[12]
