Eleanor of Aquitaine PDF
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Table 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 FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE PENGUIN BOOKS 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? PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton Published in Penguin Books 1991 Copyright © 1977 by Marion Meade All rights reserved. eISBN : 978-1-101-17393-0 The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and . do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. http://us.penguingroup.com 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
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