Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France, Queen of England

Abstract

Ralph V. Turner is the author of two major monographs, one on King John and one on Richard the Lionheart, as well as numerous studies of the Angevin empire and studies of medieval church politics and secular administration. It is therefore not surprising that one of the pleasures of this book lies in its wide-ranging description of these issues as they relate to Eleanor. In addition to the primary source materials, Turner demonstrates an extensive knowledge of the huge and on-going body of writing on Eleanor. Turner asserts that ‘no other medieval queen's reputation was so tarnished as Eleanor's by an accumulation of gossip, rumour, and outright fabrication … any trace of the real Eleanor, the queen and the mother, was overcome by a black legend that only grew with the centuries’ (p. 314). The purpose of this book is to recover the ‘real Eleanor’ from romanticising modern historians and proto-feminists as much as from medieval chroniclers and propagandists of all types. The author successfully presents an account of Eleanor as a brave and competent ruler at the heart of power politics in her own duchy of Aquitaine as well as in France and England.