Table Of ContentTable of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Acknowledgements
A Child in the Land of Love
The Devil and the Monk
Behind the Red Cross
To Jerusalem
The Unwanted Crown
Stalking the Planta Genesta
Queen of the English
Betrayals
The Court of Love
The Wheel of Fortune Turns
Autumn and After
The Last Battle
Notes and Sources
Bibliography
Index
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ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE
Marion Meade is the author of Free Woman: The Life and Times of Victoria
Woodhull, Sybille, and Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?
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First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton
Published in Penguin Books 1991
Copyright © 1977 by Marion Meade
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The proper study of mankind is woman and, by common agreement since the time of Adam, it is the
most complex and arduous.
Henry Adams
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
The family of Eleanor of Aquitaine
Preface
It is one of the paradoxes of history that those persons commonly believed to
wield the least political power may sometimes exert the greatest force on the
course of human events. Although Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and
later of England, lived at a time when women as individuals had few significant
rights, she was nevertheless the key political figure of the twelfth century. At the
age of fifteen she inherited one-quarter of modern-day France, but since women
were thought unfit to rule, her land as well as her person were delegated to the
custody of men. Her whole life thereafter became a struggle for the
independence and political power that circumstances had denied her, although
few of her contemporaries could realize this.
The historical record, written to accommodate men, has assigned women
whom it could not ignore into three classic categories: wife, mother, and whore.
Eleanor of Aquitaine can be found in all three, even though her life represented
much more. It is true that she was the wife of King Louis VII of France and King
Henry II of England, as well as the mother of one of Western civilization’s great
heroes, Richard Coeur de Lion, and also of one of the great villains, King John.
Nevertheless, she did more than marry and bear children, and as the eminent
historian Bishop William Stubbs wrote, “Few women have had less justice done
them in history than Eleanor.” That she has been judged a bitch, harlot,
adulteress, and monster is not surprising, for she was one of those rare women
who altogether refused to be bound by the rules of proper behavior for her sex;
she did as she pleased, although not without agonizing personal struggle. Her
admiring contemporary Richard of Devizes may have called her “an
incomparable woman,” but for the most part history has not agreed on how to
deal with her. For Shakespeare she was a “canker’d grandam,” “a monstrous
injurer of heaven and earth” who should be remembered for her “sin-conceiving
womb.” In the Carmina Burana, an anonymous German scholar, haunted by a
passing glimpse of Eleanor, saw her as the ultimate sex symbol:
Were the world all mine,
From the sea to the Rhine,
I’d give it all
If so be the Queen of England
