General Notes

Women had few rights in the Middle Ages. They were expected to obey their fathers and, after they married, their husbands. Even wealthy noblewomen had little control over their own destinies. They were treated like pawns on a marital chessboard, to be handed-- together with their estates--from father to groom. One noblewoman who started out as a pawn but managed to become one of the most powerful persons of her day was Eleanor of Aquitaine, King John's mother.

In 1137, when Eleanor was fifteen, her father, the Duke of Aquitaine, died. With an inheritance that included nearly half of southern France, the teenage heiress soon caught the attention of the French king, who, like most medieval monarchs, viewed marriage as a way to gain territory and power. Thus, Eleanor's vast landholdings made her the ideal match for the heir to the French throne, the future Louis VII. Just one month after she was forced to marry Louis, he succeeded his father as king. Eleanor spent 15 years as his queen. Then, in 1152, Louis divorced her for falling to fulfill a medieval queen's main duty: producing a son to inherit the throne.

The newly single Eleanor was hounded by fortune hunters. She knew she had to remarry, and quickly. But this time she would choose the groom. He was Henry Plantagenet, soon to be King Henry II of England.
Unlike many medieval kings, Henry gave his queen important responsibilities. While it was not unusual for barons to entrust their wives with running their estates when they were absent, Henry entrusted Eleanor with running the entire kingdom for him on his frequent trips away from England.

Eleanor and Henry had eight children, including five sons. In time, their marriage soured, and Eleanor moved to one of her French estates. There she became a patroness of troubadours (wandering musicians who sang about romantic love). In 1173, she helped her sons rebel against their father. After crushing the revolt, Henry placed Eleanor under house arrest, where she stayed until his death 16 years later.

Following her release, Eleanor reentered the political fray. She helped her son Richard seize power, and then governed England for him while he was away crusading in the Middle East. After Richard's death, Eleanor assisted John, her youngest son, in securing the throne. She remained one of King John's closest advisors until her death in 1204.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was born into a society that gave women little power. Yet, she managed to attain great influence and to shape the political events of her day in decisive ways.
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The 12th century was a long time ago. Looking back at it is a little like gazing at the clear starry sky of a winter night. Most of what is there escapes us, what we do see is beautiful and engrossing but hard to make sense of, and even the brightest stars remain shrouded in mystery. To the most probing telescope, they reveal but few of their secrets, and often only the most superficial ones. Among the stars of the 12th century, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine by birth, queen of France then queen of England by marriage, certainly shines brightest. But how much do we really know about her?
Enough to make her the subject of a biography, British author Alison Weir believed, in spite of the people who warned her that "it would be almost impossible for a biographer to do justice to a woman who lived eight centuries ago." Perhaps she should have listened. Indeed, we know almost nothing of Eleanor as a person, of what she looked like, of how she lived her daily life, let alone of what she thought and felt. All we know a little about -- and what incomplete, patchy knowledge it is -- is where she went and what she did as a public figure, generally in connection with the actions of the men in her life: her two successive husbands, Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and her ill-fated sons, particularly Richard I and King John. As a result, Weir's book tends to read like a survey of Anglo-French high politics in the 1100s, albeit one with a special emphasis on Eleanor.
This is not meant as a reproach. What choice did the author have, especially since she decided, commendably, to base her study mostly on contemporary sources, and to treat the legends and rumors already surrounding the queen in her lifetime for what they are?
Besides, Weir does a pretty decent job of recounting what we know of the events in which Eleanor was directly or indirectly involved: the disastrous Second Crusade, during which she created scandal by spending a little too much time alone with her uncle Raymond of Antioch; the murder of Thomas a Becket, which turned that proud and worldly man into an instant saint; the ransoming of Richard the Lionhearted, her favorite son, for whom she traveled to Germany in the dead of winter at age 72.
But carefully reading and reporting what contemporary sources have to say about her subject is only part of the historian's craft. Next should come an effort to establish a context, then an attempt to understand what it all may have meant to the actors and what it may mean to us. Here Weir fails. Whatever general context she provides for her narrative is sketchy, rather outdated, and sometimes inaccurate. As for interpretation, there is none. Wars are won, then lost, treaties are sworn, then broken, marriages are arranged, then annulled, revolts break out, then are crushed, then break out again, and no pattern emerges, no deeper understanding of medieval politics or even of why we should care at all about Eleanor, her husbands, her children, their deeds and their misdeeds. Weir does repeat over and over that her heroine was a remarkable woman, but we never do see or feel this alleged greatness. We never get the vaguest sense of what it may have been like to be Eleanor of Aquitaine. What's the point, then, of a biography?
Weir would have been more successful, I suspect, if she had been a little less high-minded. Trying to be scholarly and rigorous, she ended up defeating her biographical purpose. Perhaps she should have taken the lower road instead. For Eleanor's life is the stuff that trashy bestsellers are made of: prodigious wealth and commensurate greed, passionate love and no less passionate hatred, family dysfunction on a continental scale, adultery, incest, messy divorce, kidnapping, mysterious disappearance, and murder (in the cathedral!). Had she shamelessly exploited this tabloid potential, even at the cost of using some imagination to fill in the many holes of the story as we have it, Weir might have written a more evocative biography and conveyed a better sense of the character of Eleanor and of the world she lived in and helped fashion.
So, if you want the mere facts of the queen's life, by all means, read Weir's book. But if you'd rather catch a glimpse of what it may have been like to be Eleanor of Aquitaine, rent the video of "The Lion in Winter." It's an anachronistic campfest, all right, but I can't help thinking that in some weird way it contains precisely the kind of truth that's missing from Weir's book. Perhaps it's Katharine Hepburn's performance. After all, don't we often learn about faraway stars by looking at those closer to us?
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