figure [the otherwise self praising Abelard] cuts in his own pages....Here the motive [in blaming himself for a cold seduction] is part protective...for Abelard to take all the moral burden on himself and shield, to the extent he can, the now widely respected abbess of the Paraclete—and also in part justificatory—to magnify the crime to the proportions of its punishment." David Wulstan writes, "Much of what Abelard says in the Historia Calamitatum does not ring true: his arrogation of blame for the cold seduction of his pupil is hardly fortified by the letters of Heloise; this and various supposed violations seem contrived to build a farrago of supposed guilt which he must expiate by his retreat into monasticism and by distancing himself from his former lover." Heloise is thus motivated in her responses to Abelard's letters to set the record straight, that if anything she had initiated their relationship. Héloïse's writings express a much more positive attitude toward their past relationship than does Abelard. She does not renounce her encounters as sinful and she does not "accept that [Abelard's] love for her could die, even by the horrible act of...castration." It is important in investigating these allegations of abuse or harassment on Abelard's part to consider the crude sexual ethics of the time (in which a prior relationship was generally taken as establishing consent), Heloise's letters which depict her as complicit if not the initiator of sexual interaction, and Abelard's position as an abbot relative to Heloise, an abbess, towards whom he owed a debt of responsibility and guardianship. By depicting himself—a castrated and now repentant monk—as to blame for their liaison, he denied Heloise her own sexual scandal and maintained the purity of her reputation. An allegation of sexual impropriety on the part of Heloise would furthermore endanger the sanctity of Abelard's property, the Paraclete, which could be claimed by more powerful figures in government or the Catholic Church. Heloise's prior convent at Argenteuil and another convent at St. Eloi had already been shut down by the Catholic hierarchy due to accusations of sexual impropriety by nuns. Monasteries run by male monks were generally in no such danger, so Abelard sealing his reputation as a repentant scoundrel would not harm him. Waithe indicated in a 2009 interview with Karen Warren that she has "softened the position [she] took earlier" in light of Mews' subsequent attribution of the Epistolae Duorum