Two reputed representations of Eleanor of Aquitaine from her lifetime -a re-evaluation (original) (raw)
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Why has the study of Eleanor of Aquitaine often been obfuscated by legend and prejudice?
2019
Eleanor of Aquitaine has undoubtedly suffered more than most historical figures from excessive mythologising, and as a result has “inspired some of the very worst historical writing devoted to the European Middle Ages”. In the 1940s and 1950s Frank Chambers and H.G. Richardson made the first sallies in attempting to dispel the more lurid parts of the legend surrounding Eleanor, one which was (and would continue to be) widely propagated by scholars and those involved in the less factually conscionable spheres of literature, film and painting in which Eleanor has proved so perpetually fascinating. Chambers, however, argued that “these stories, false as they are, generally have some basis in fact”. This demonstrates the problem of disentangling the fact from the fiction when it comes to the study of Eleanor. However, these early attempts to “dismantle the mythic scaffolding that has encased her for centuries” did not initially attract much attention. This is testimony to the lasting power and endurance of Eleanor’s legend which has continued to influence modern historians. However, it would be fair to state that in recent decades historians have made important re-appraisals of Eleanor, rehabilitating her reputation and dismantling the mythology which surrounds her.
Marie de Champagne and Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Relationship Reexamined
Speculum, 1979
UNTIL recently, the influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine upon her daughter, Marie de Champagne, was taken for granted. Many well-known and respected scholars have spoken authoritatively of the interaction between the two women at Eleanor's court in Poitiers where, together, they supposedly reigned over courts of love, the judgments from which were recorded by Andreas Capellanus in his De Amore. Rita Lejeune tells us that: "On a conserve certains de ces jugements, prononces a une date mal determinee, mais dont beaucoup doivent se situer aux environs de 1170, lorsque Marie frequentait la cour de sa mere a Poitiers." 1 Amy Kelly has gone so far as to assert that Marie was selected as a veritable "maitresse d'ecole for the royal academy in Poitiers." 2 She describes in fond detail the "disquieting" and unruly condition in which Marie found the court. "What the countess obviously needed for her royal academy," we are told, "was. .. a code of manners to transform the anarchy and confusion that confronted her into something refined, serious, and decorous." 3 As a result, Andreas Capellanus was set to work to write his De Amore. As scholars were well aware, this description of Marie's function at the court of Poitiers was in large measure a product of the fertile imagination of Amy Kelly. Still, the belief in this interaction between the two women was assumed to be essentially accurate, and John Jay Parry spoke for many scholars when he commented on Kelly's account of Marie's visit to Eleanor's court: "Part of her work is based upon inference, but I have no doubt that it is substantially correct." 4 Within recent years, however, John F. Benton has * I am indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a grant which made this study possible. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first regional meeting of the International Courtly Literature Society-American branch, held in conjunction with the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in November, 1977. 1 Rita Lejeune, "Role litteraire de la famille d'Alienor d'Aquitaine," Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale I (1958), 325. 2 Amy Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (New York, 1950), p. 202. Marion Meade in her recent biography of Eleanor continues this myth of a more or less formal academy at Poitiers, as she comments, "To her daughter [Marie] she [Eleanor] assigned the task of educating these high spirited male subjects of hers so that the younger generation might be molded into civilized beings who, not so incidentally, would know how to respect women." Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography (New York, 1977), p. 252. One of the most useful scholarly works that has appeared on Eleanor in recent years is the collection of essays from the Symposia in the Arts and the Humanities, No. 3, at the University of Texas at Austin, edited by William W. Kibler and published under the title of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patron and Politician (Austin and London, 1976). 3 Kelly, Eleanor, p. 205.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Twelfth-Century English Chroniclers and her 'Black Legend'
Nottingham Medieval Studies, 2008
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204) ranks as a favourite of modern biographers, and in the twentieth-century writings on this twelfth-century personality attained the proportions of a 'romanticizing "Eleanor industry".' 1 In approaching Eleanor, historians today face the sharply differing standards of her medieval contemporaries, modern scholars, and popular writers in depicting a powerful woman's place in medieval society and government. Because of this, the twelfth century's most famous woman can provoke either modern biographers' 'uncritical enthusiasm, or else curiously grudging dismissal'. 2 Perhaps the primary example of the enthusiastic approach is Amy Kelly's Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, first published over a half century ago and still in print. 3 W. L. Warren's dismissal of Eleanor in his biography of her second husband, Henry II shows the grudging attitude, 'To judge from the chroniclers, the most striking fact about Eleanor is her utter insignificance in Henry II's reign.' 4
Peregrinations, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 117-39, 2023
This article considers Queen Eleanor of Castile's (d.1290) tomb in Westminster Abbey, and the crusading-themed imagery that adorned it. The paper argues that Eleanor's memorial celebrated her sponsorship of a crusader, and championed this act as an aspect of model 13th-century queenship. Medieval artistry that speaks directly to crusading culture is remarkably rare within England - this paper offers a study of a rare and fascinating instance.
The Outlandish Lioness: Eleanor of Aquitaine in Literature
Medieval Feminist Forum
The panel followed the showing of Lion in Winter, which features Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitoine. The remarks of participants Fiona Tolhurst, Constance Berman, and R6Gena DeAragon follow. THE OUTLANDISH LIONESS: ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE IN LITERATURE The image the viewer gets of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Anthony Harvey's The Lion in Winter is that she was a woman of many talents and moods who was both dangerous and fascinating. This image is like the one a reader gets of Eleanor in literature-and for good reason: the lack of detailed records of Eleanor's life has enabled writers of annals, chronicle histories, and poems to create varied and fantastic tales about the woman who managed to be Queen of France and then England.' Because generic distinctions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries among annal, chronicle, and literature are fuzzy at best, one striking pattern that emerges as a reader compares the historical and literary sources about Eleanor is that she is a figure at the mercy of continual literary reconstruction. Even in literary works such as Wace's Brut and Lawman's Roman de Brut where her reputation is invoked indirectly through the character of Guenevere, Eleanor of Aquitaine becomes an Everywoman whom each male historian or poet uses to praise or critique the women of his own culture and time. I would argue, then, that every version of Eleanor a reader or viewer encounters is, at least to some extent, literary-a product of the imagination of a writer using her as an emblem of womankind.
The Construction of Queenship in the Illustrated Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei (Gesta 52, 2013)
Gesta 52.1: 21–42. , 2013
Completed about 1250, the version of La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei preserved in Cambridge University Library MS Ee.3.59 is the only known illustrated Anglo-Norman life of St. Edward, the last Anglo-Saxon king from the House of Wessex. !e Cambridge manuscript was likely copied from the now-lost presentation copy made by Matthew Paris that was given to Eleanor of Provence following her marriage to King Henry III of England in 1236. Because the original was created amid Henry’s growing devotion to his saint-king ancestor and his renovation of Edward’s church at Westminster, much of the scholarship on the Estoire has centered on Henry’s religious and political inclinations. This focus has emerged despite the poem’s explicit dedication to Eleanor of Provence, which the Cambridge manuscript retains. The present study aims to reorient research on this manuscript by considering how the epithalamium introduces Eleanor as a reader of the Estoire and thus presents thirteenth-century English queenship through the eleventh -century figures of Emma, Gunnilda, and Edith. Although Eleanor may never have possessed the Cambridge manuscript, its text and illustrations can be understood as speaking directly to her, thereby shaping the image of English queens for contemporary readers. Because similar saints’ lives circulated among the English aristocracy, it is critical to our understanding of the Cambridge manuscript to explore how this undercurrent of queenship in the Estoire would have been received by a potentially broad audience. Read in this way, the Estoire becomes a compilation of text and image that places Eleanor of Provence both alongside these readers and in a succession of virtuous royal women in the life of St. Edward.
The tomb monument of Katherine, daughter of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence (1253-7)
The Antiquaries Journal, 92, pp. 169-196, 2012
An English princess of the mid-thirteenth century, dead by the age of three and a half, Katherine occupies only a footnote in the history of England. Yet the costly tomb monument at Westminster Abbey provided by her grieving father, Henry III, was probably the earliest recorded memorial to a child known to have been set up in England. It may also have been part of Henry’s response to the commemoration programme that his brother-in-law, Louis IX of France, had instigated. Nothing now apparently remains of Katherine’s tomb to remind posterity of her brief existence, but its commissioning marked a step up in Henry’s growing ambition to be seen as an innovator at the forefront of the artistic developments of his age, and the story surrounding its provision affords insights into the role of display and material culture in Henrician politics.