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A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor—gossip often qualified by the curious phrase “it was said,” or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired. While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveals about this queen and life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. She reads the Middle Ages, not to impose our current conceptual categories on its culture, but to expose the conceptual categories medieval women used to make sense of their lives. Along the way, Sullivan paints a fresh portrait of this singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was the wife of two kings, Louis VII of France and Henry II Plantagenet of England, and the mother of two others, Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland. In her eventful, often stormy life, she not only influenced the course of events in the twelfth century but also encouraged remarkable advances in the literary and fine arts. In this book, experts in five disciplines—history, art history, music, French and English literature—evaluate the influence of Eleanor and her court on history and the arts.

Elizabeth A. R. Brown views Eleanor as having played a significant role as parent and politician, but not as patron. Rebecca A. Baltzer takes a new look at the music of the period that was written by and for Eleanor, her court, and her family. Moshé Lazar reexamines her relationship to the courtly-love literature of the period. Eleanor S. Greenhill and Larry M. Ayres reassess her influence in the realm of art history. Rossell Hope Robbins traces the lines extending from the French courtly literature of Eleanor's period down into fourteenth-century Chaucerian England. The essays reflect divergent but generally complementary assessments of this remarkable woman's influence on her own era and on future times as well.

This volume is the result of a symposium held at the University of Texas in 1973.