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This course looks at some varieties of the heroic life as it was lived by four actual medieval women. Each of these women had grand ambitions, profound intelligence, and dramatic achievements, and each of these women still has her measure of fame and infamy. Interestingly, three of our four subjects’ lives overlapped in time in the twelfth century. The twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen lived the dramatic life of a prophet who brought to her voluminous writings and preaching a rare ecological sense of life’s wholeness; in these lectures, we discuss Hildegard as the last flowering of antique learning. Her personal courage, as a passionate speaker for clerical and imperial reform, give her special interest in our own day. Heloise is another twelfth-century abbess, but she is better known to us as the consummate Parisian, a spectacular lover who preferred (as she said) to be Abelard’s mistress than his wife. Her letters passionately overflow with the new knowledge of her day, a mode of philosophic thought that she and Abelard were together inventing. Heloise is a harbinger of Europe’s new day. The third twelfth-century figure is Eleanor of Aquitaine, duchess, twice queen, and mother of at least ten children. She has captivated all later ages, though we discuss ways in which she remains a strangely elusive epic figure. Finally, we consider the girl-hero Joan of Arc, a fifteenth-century peasant who rose to lead her king’s soldiers to a daring victory over their enemies. Each of these women is larger than life, powerfully projecting the past into the future.