Product Description

These essays provide a fresh context for understanding Eleanor of Aquitaine's multi-faceted career and reputation. She is a pivotal figure in the history of the twelfth century because of her lordly inheritance as well as the political and diplomatic scope of her marital rank as queen. Essays in this collection reassess the often fragmentary historical information about her life, and investigate her reputation in literary and historical contexts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #475092 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 540 pages

About the Author
BONNIE WHEELER is Director of the Medieval Studies Program at Southern Methodist University, USA. She edits the journal Arthuriana as well as Palgrave Macmillan's New Middle Ages series. 

JOHN C. PARSONS is the author of Eleanor of Castile and co-editor of Capetian Women.

Customer Reviews

Eleanor of Aquitaine: a total character analysis
The copy on the flap describes this book well: "The twenty chapters by scholars in various fields provide a fresh context for understanding Eleanor of Aquitaine's multi-faceted career and reputation. Her fame (and infamy) still fascinates us." The phrase "fresh context" should perhaps read "total context" because "Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady" studies Eleanor's responses and actions through every facet of her times.

Let's face it, Eleanor's "infamy" is the source and sustenance of our enduring fascination nine centuries on. Had she lived the straightened life expected of her, she would long ago have been forgotten. Eleanor's infamy marks the track of an exceptional lady's refusal to bow to the restrictive, male-centric mores of her times. Another factor is also at work: Had she been Peter Abelard, the Church would have known how to cope with her. But a strong-willed noble female in the twelfth century was beyond the reach of correction or reason.

As these scholarly authors dissect Eleanor's times and the mindset that established and reinforced her character they are clearly not considering Mae West's dictum, "Any publicity is good publicity." However, whether they know it or not, they are examining the minutiae of Eleanor's psyche through Mae West's next line: "When I'm good, I'm very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better."

Eleanor spent the first fifteen years of her life in the relatively relaxed atmosphere of her father's courts in Poitou and Aquitaine. The full weight of Christianity imposed through faith by rote and censure did not strike her fully until she entered Paris as its queen. In short, Eleanor had experienced a broader, happier world for long enough that her early years made a lasting difference. Refusing to let social and religious constraint limit her scope, she found in herself the courage and character to fight priestly cant and society's cynicism for the rest of her days (while generating plenty of cynicism of her own).

"Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady" examines Eleanor and her environments from every possible angle. The book's scholarly analyses are academic and sober: I miss the playfulness of irreverence, the tweaking of clerical and noble noses. That said, "Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady" provides an extraordinarily vivid resource, for scholars, and for general readers who want to understand the woman and the motives for her reactions and counterblasts against her many critics and her times.

Robert Fripp, Author...
"Power of a Woman. Memoirs of a Turbulent Life: Eleanor of Aquitaine"