Abelard tells his own wreck: the Paris schools, Heloise, the mutilation, the cloister. The Story of My Misfortune is twelfth-century autobiography as defence and prayer—brilliance, love, enemies, and a God who did not explain. A mind that would not be small, written from the far side of ruin. Heloise is not a footnote. The letter is pride, theology, and a body that remembers. Read it as a medieval mind refusing to call disaster anything but disaster.