We don’t have the actual letters written by Abelard and Heloise themselves, but we do have lots of copies of a collection of their letters. Somebody (maybe Heloise) collected eight of the letters together into one manuscript, and then copies were made of that, and then copies made of that copy, and so on and so on…so what we have now are much later copies from the 13th century and afterwards.

The standard collection contains Peter’s “history of my misfortunes”, which is written like a letter, as well as seven other letters. One manuscript of the letters was published in 1616, and then “critical editions” of the manuscripts began to be published in the 19th century. A "critical" edition basically means that historians have examined and compared all the different surviving manuscripts to find the best version. The most recent critical edition is The Letter Collection of Abelard and Heloise, edited by David Luscombe and translated by Betty Radice (Oxford University Press, 2013; Radice’s translation is actually from 1947 and was revised by Luscombe for this edition).

“Their collection is both small and unusual: it contains only eight of their own letters arranged in sequence. There are twelve surviving medieval copies of this collection and one copy of a thirteenth-century translation in Old French.” (Luscombe, pg. xix)

Listed alphabetically by city, the manuscripts are:

- Brugge, Stadsbibliothek 398

- Douai, Bibliothèque municipale 797

- Notre Dame (Indiana) University Memorial Library 30

- Oxford, Bodleian Library Add. C 271

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale n. acq. fr. 20001

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 2544

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 2545

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 2816

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 2923

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 13057

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale lat. 13826

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale n. acq. lat. 1873

- Reims, Bibliothèque municipale 872

- Schøyen collection 2085

- Troyes, Médiathèque 802

Plus the medieval French translation:

- Paris, Bibliothèque nationale fr. 920

Since most of the manuscripts (and the oldest ones) are in Paris, presumably Heloise (or somebody) brought the letters there from her monastery (Peter’s Oratory of the Paraclete) and then they were copied in Paris and made there way elsewhere. I’m not sure about the others but the BNF has a lot of digitized manuscripts, including lat. 2923, which seems to be the oldest one (it’s “Manuscript A” in Luscombe’s edition). You can see it here.

So, we don’t have the letters written by Abelard and Heloise themselves in the 12th century, but we do have several copies of the letters made in the 13th century and later, and those are the ones that historians use to make editions of the Latin letters, and to translate them into English.