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Abelard's Undercarriage: What Exactly Happened?

MrRING

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I'm sure many here are familiar with famous medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise, and how after much to-do, Abelard was castrated and continued to carry on an affair of the heart with Heloise for the restbof his life.

Here is my question: did the villains who attacked Abelard take both his twig and berries, just his twig, just his berries, or what? I would think in the 1100's that to remove a penis would be a slow death sentence, but Abelard lived a long life. Considering that animal husbandry was known, it makes sense to me that just the berries got snipped, but Abelard's description makes it sound like they cut the whole thing off.

Any ideas about this in Forteana-land?
 
'Castration' is variably used to connote removal of the testes, the penis, or both. It most often alludes to testicular excision alone.

With specific regard to Abelard, the most specific answer I can find is within this online scholarly article about self-castration (and castration in general).
Abelard was accosted at night by Heloise’s uncle and his henchmen, and his testicles removed in a sequence of events that, as Irvine points out, mirrored those of a rape.(25) The attack was explicitly designed to humiliate Abelard, and it initially worked.(26) He entered a monastery and persuaded Heloise to become a nun. At length, however, he exploited his castrate status to depict himself as intellectually and spiritually superior.(27) Notably, Abelard’s attackers, when apprehended, were subjected to both castration and blinding. This was arguably the closest possible thing to castrating the men twice over, since blinding and gelding were so closely associated.(28) ...

Here are the references cited in the quoted paragraph:

25
Martin Irvine, ‘Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity, and Remasculinization’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds, Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 87–106, 97.
26
Sean Eisen Murphy, ‘The Letter of the Law: Abelard, Moses, and the Problem with Being a Eunuch’, Journal of Medieval History, 2004, 30, 161–85, at 163.
27
Bonnie Wheeler, ‘Origenary Fantasies: Abelard’s Castration and Confession’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds, Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 107–28.
28
Irvine, ‘Abelard and (Re)Writing the Male Body’, 97.

SOURCE: https://academic.oup.com/shm/article/33/2/377/5183317
 
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