#Eleanor of Aquitaine

[wonder-worker]

A central element of the myth of [Eleanor of Aquitaine] is that of her exceptionalism. Historians and Eleanor biographers have tended to take literally Richard of Devizes’s conventional panegyric of her as ‘an incomparable woman’ [and] a woman out of her time. […] Amazement at Eleanor’s power and independence is born from a presentism that assumes generally that the Middle Ages were a backward age, and specifically that medieval women were all downtrodden and marginalized. Eleanor’s career can, from such a perspective, only be explained by assuming that she was an exception who rose by sheer force of personality above the restrictions placed upon twelfth-century women.

-Michael R. Evans, Inventing Eleanor: The Medieval and Post-Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine

"...The idea of Eleanor’s exceptionalism rests on an assumption that women of her age were powerless. On the contrary, in Western Europe before the twelfth century there were ‘no really effective barriers to the capacity of women to exercise power; they appear as military leaders, judges, castellans, controllers of property’. […] In an important article published in 1992, Jane Martindale sought to locate Eleanor in context, stripping away much of the conjecture that had grown up around her, and returning to primary sources, including her charters. Martindale also demonstrated how Eleanor was not out of the ordinary for a twelfth-century queen either in the extent of her power or in the criticisms levelled against her.

If we look at Eleanor’s predecessors as Anglo-Norman queens of England, we find many examples of women wielding political power. Matilda of Flanders (wife of William the Conqueror) acted as regent in Normandy during his frequent absences in England following the Conquest, and [the first wife of Henry I, Matilda of Scotland, played some role in governing England during her husband's absences], while during the civil war of Stephen’s reign Matilda of Boulogne led the fight for a time on behalf of her royal husband, who had been captured by the forces of the empress. And if we wish to seek a rebel woman, we need look no further than Juliana, illegitimate daughter of Henry I, who attempted to assassinate him with a crossbow, or Adèle of Champagne, the third wife of Louis VII, who ‘[a]t the moment when Henry II held Eleanor of Aquitaine in jail for her revolt … led a revolt with her brothers against her son, Philip II'.

Eleanor is, therefore, less the exception than the rule – albeit an extreme example of that rule. This can be illustrated by comparing her with a twelfth century woman who has attracted less literary and historical attention. Adela of Blois died in 1137, the year of Eleanor’s marriage to Louis VII. […] The chronicle and charter evidence reveals Adela to have ‘legitimately exercised the powers of comital lordship’ in the domains of Blois-Champagne, both in consort with her husband and alone during his absence on crusade and after his death. […] There was, however, nothing atypical about the nature of Adela’s power. In the words of her biographer Kimberley LoPrete, ‘while the extent of Adela’s powers and the political impact of her actions were exceptional for a woman of her day (and indeed for most men), the sources of her powers and the activities she engaged in were not fundamentally different from those of other women of lordly rank’. These words could equally apply to Eleanor; the extent of her power, as heiress to the richest lordship in France, wife of two kings and mother of two or three more, was remarkable, but the nature of her power was not exceptional. Other noble or royal women governed, arranged marriages and alliances, and were patrons of the church. Eleanor represents one end of a continuum, not an isolated outlier."

[ladygodgiven]

[stephantom]

Eleanor: You'd only just found Rosamund. Henry: Not her so damn particularly. I found other women. Eleanor: Countless others. Henry: What's your count?

+ bonus

[medievalandfantasymelee]

👑🌹The Queen of Love and Beauty🌹👑

Round 2: 6 of 6

The Queen of Love and Beauty shall hold the honour of presenting unto the winner of the Tournament his Champion's Coronet.

Vote for the lady who, to you, best exemplifies feminine dignity, grace and loveliness

The three contenders with the most votes will advance.

Row 1

- Princess Isabella Maria Lucia Elizabetta of Valencia [Karen David], Galavant (2015-2016)

- Danielle de Barbarac [Drew Barrymore], Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998)

Row 2

- Eleanore of Aquitaine [Katharine Hepburn], The Lion in Winter (1968)

- Guinevere [Angel Coulby], BBC’s Merlin (2008-2012)

Row 3

- Isabeau of Anjou [Michelle Pfeiffer], Ladyhawke (1985)

- Padmavati [Deepika Padukone], Padmaavat (2018)

[liveactionproblematicotd]

Today’s problematic ship is King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine from The Lion in Winter

Toxic

Requested by anonymous

[bucksboobs]

She ordered the assassiSLAYtion of the ArchMOTHER of CUNTerbury by asking “will no one rid me of this SERVEulant PUSSY?”

[shirleyjacksonism]

"What does it mean to be a descendant of something monstrous? To still love the monster?"

On Earth We're Breafly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong // How to Wear Your Mother's Lipstick, Warsan Shrine // Taint, Paul Tran // The Lion in Winter (1968) // Mirror Traps, Hera Lindsay Bird // No Human Hands to Touch, Elizabeth Wein // Family Tree (Intro), Ethel Cain // The Winter Prince, Elizabeth Wein // On Hysteria, Sam Sax

[cesareeborgia]

↳ favourite queen consorts of england

[angevinyaoiz]

Love and War

[incendavery]

queen eleanor's confession

[entropiasgift]

"Dear me, whatever shall we do with mother?"

[wonder-worker]

A ‘Black Legend’ was formed within [Eleanor of Aquitaine's] own lifetime and in the decades immediately after her death by clerical chroniclers who viewed her with suspicion as a powerful and independent woman. [She was depicted as ‘a queen who was not only an adulteress but who usurped male sovereignty by demanding an annulment of her first marriage, choosing her second husband on her own authority and later instigating her sons into rebellion against him’] The Black Legend was inflated by posthumous exaggeration or invention, so that as early as the mid-thirteenth century her rumoured affair with Prince Raymond was transformed into a dalliance with Saladin. The later Middle Ages and early-modern period added further calumnies, notably the legend that she murdered Rosamond de Clifford, her rival for the affections of Henry II.

If the medieval and early-modern image of Eleanor was a largely negative one, the twentieth century saw a backlash – inspired to a great extent by Second-Wave Feminism – which sought to restore the image of Eleanor, with a few added embellishments. A ‘more flattering kind of character distortion’ developed that created ‘an idealized picture of her as a romantic figure’. For authors such as Amy Kelly, Régine Pernoud and Marion Meade, Eleanor became a feminist heroine, political thinker and activist, patron of the troubadours, judge of the ‘Courts of Love’ and bearer of the enlightened culture of the Midi to a gloomy and priest-ridden north. While providing a useful corrective to the Black Legend, the twentieth-century backlash threatened to create a counter-mythology as powerful as the one it sought to overturn. In the words of Jacques Le Goff, she is as much a figure of romance as of history, and ‘has been both the victim of a black legend and the beneficiary of an embellished [or golden] myth’.

-Michael R. Evans, Inventing Eleanor: The Medieval and Post-Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine

[isadomna]

Berenguela and Blanche of Castile

Daughters of Alfonso VIII of Castile and Eleanor of England, Berenguela maintained strong connections with her sister Blanche, Queen of France. Their letters are in Latin. Latin was still, at the beginning of the 13th century, the language of writing, while French and Castilian became the languages ​​commonly spoken, even at court. Berenguela and Blanche were well-educated, competent and forceful like their formidable grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The two sisters will also lead a parallel existence, each exerting, in their own country, a comparable influence. Much like her younger sister Blanche in France, Berenguela presents an interesting case of co-rulership with her son in Castile. Furthermore, both have ties with warfare and played determinant roles in the success of military campaigns as well as access to – and maintenance of – the throne.

Berenguela and Blanche directed a great deal of their personal energy into assuring that all of their children were appropriately married. It was Blanche who suggested sending Joan of Ponthieu as a bride for her nephew Fernando after his first wife's death. Berenguela and Blanche became the mothers of fighting saints King Fernando III and King Louis IX.

In the Archives Nationales de France are nine letters written to King Louis VIII and his wife Blanche of Castile, during Louis’s brief reign from 1223 to 1226. These letters informed Louis VIII that Alfonso VIII of Castile had intended his throne to pass to a son of Louis and Blanche, if his own son Enrique died without heirs. Louis VIII should therefore immediately send his son to Castile, where his correspondents—the scions of several major Castilian noble houses—would take up arms to set him on the throne and overthrow the “foreigner” (alienus) who was in power. The most prominent of these Castilian magnates were Rodrigo Díaz de Cameros and Gonzalo Pérez de Molina. This conspiracy was an explicit attempt to dispose of the current Castilian monarchy and replace it with a new configuration of rulers. It was therefore a far more serious threat than either Rodrigo Díaz’s or Gonzalo Pérez’s earlier revolts had been. And it was aimed squarely at the legitimacy of the reigning monarchs.

The letters’ most perplexing feature is the suggestion that Blanche’s claim to the Castilian throne superseded Berenguela’s. Some historians have even taken this as evidence that Blanche was the elder sister, though that claim is patently false. Yet the plot to overthrow Fernando III was first of all an attempt to unseat Berenguela. It was through her that Fernando III claimed hereditary right and legitimate descent from Alfonso VIII. To say that Alfonso VIII had excluded Berenguela from the succession, and to describe Fernando as a “foreigner,” was to reject the Castilian identity that Berenguela had tried to reclaim during her ten years as a solitary queen in her father’s court, and that she had negotiated with varying success during her regency and the subsequent wars. It was to define her not as the daughter and sister of the latest kings of Castile, but as the cast-off wife of the king of León.

To be sure, Blanche and her sons were at least as French as Berenguela and Fernando III were Leonese. But the rebels were apparently willing to overlook this quibble; their appeal was directed as much to Louis VIII as to his queen. Besides, the threat of union with France was diminished by the fact that Blanche and Louis VIII had no fewer than five living sons at the time that they ruled France. The rebels never insisted that the son sent to them should be Louis VIII’s firstborn, and a younger brother’s accession in Castile considerably reduced the risk of union between the crowns. All five French princes were underage, but so much the better; the minorities of Alfonso VIII and Enrique I had proved how much power nobles could gain in a regency. Louis VIII was sufficiently intrigued by the rebels’ offer to have asked them for proof of their promised support. His wife, however, was likely to be less sympathetic. A combination of Blanche’s unwillingness to contribute to her older sister’s overthrow and Fernando III’s military successes after 1224 probably quashed the plot.

Sources:

JANNA BIANCHINI,THE QUEEN'S HAND: POWER AND AUTHORITY IN THE REIGN OF BERENGUELA OF CASTILE

Regine Pernoud, La Reine Blanche

[satansemployee]

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— callbacks in the lion in winter (1968)‎‎

A little project to tide me up while I wait to complete my binding of the movie screenplay. This is the second draft of the screenplay for the movie, so a couple quotes might not be found in the movie (like John's "mother me") but also might be missing. even though this draft has some amazing deleted lines.

the quotes are just in order of when I thought about them, since I was surprised by just how explicit some themes are. watching it with subtitles the amount of "dogs barking" around when Henry does anything is almost comical. But at the same time they're not simple callbacks, ya know? The motivs are just subtle enough to be motivs but you can still find them in writing. Anyway. James Goldman has now become my ridicolous writing standard to aspire to that I'll never achieve. gooood for me.

(edited on 29/06 and added another callback)

[goodqueenaly]

Grrm has said that he considers Queen Alysanne to be the Eleanor of Aquitaine of Westeros. do you like that comparison and/or can find any parallels?

For what it's worth, I tend to take that statement in context - namely, as a direction to the artist Amok on how he, GRRM, envisioned Alysanne. It is perhaps unsurprising that GRRM would reach for Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor in The Lion in Winter as the physical model for his older Alysanne: the 1968 classic featuring a dominating queenly lead would have been right in the young GRRM's wheelhouse, fitting comfortably alongside the midcentury medievalism which seems to have laid the early groundwork in his mind for ASOIAF. (Though in terms of personality, I think Hepburn's Eleanor may be more akin to someone like Olenna Redwyne - the powerful elder woman, sassy, confident, scheming, and ambitious.)

Anyway, I don't see much in the way of very strong parallels between Eleanor and Alysanne. Certainly, both women shared long but sometimes troubled marriages and many children, though these features are hardly unique to Eleanor. Alysanne was not, as Eleanor was, a titled and independent aristocrat in her own right, with an inheritance of her own to return to and rule (what a pity Alysanne did not have her own Poitiers to escape Jaehaerys!). Alysanne did not come to Jaehaerys a (former) queen and mature woman, but was instead a teenage princess (although you might make a thin comparison between Alysanne's attempt to elude a Baratheon marriage by eloping with Jaehaerys and Eleanor's escape from kidnapping and forced marriage to wed Henry II). The marriage of Henry and Eleanor was not, as Jaehaerys and Alysanne's was (at least to begin with) purely an affair of romantic passion but rather a political pact between high-ranking peers. The personal divisions between Jaehaerys and Alysanne were rooted not in spousal infidelity (which Henry practiced so spectacularly) nor filial rebellion, but rather Jaehaerys' violent misogyny. Alysanne's political power was far more limited than Eleanor's ever was, not only because Eleanor had her own properties, but because she was empowered to be regent in the reigns of both her husband and her son Richard. Eleanor was far more active in arranging politically advantageous marriages for her children and granddaughters than Alysanne ever seems to have been (especially since Fire and Blood Volume 1 did little to focus on diplomatic marriages for the Targaryen princes and princesses). Eleanor continued to be active politically and religiously well into widowhood (and indeed survived Henry II by some 15 years), while Alysanne of course predeceased Jaehaerys.

If we are looking for one specific historical source of inspiration as GRRM was creating Alysanne, I think the answer is Philippa of Hainault, especially as depicted in The Accursed Kings - the specifically less than beautiful princess, married for love as a teenager to her likewise teenage groom, a long-serving queen to the (ostensibly) greatest king of his dynasty, mother of a large family and the beau ideal of medieval queenship. (It's perhaps worth noting - and groaning once again - that Maurice Druon himself had nothing kind to say about Eleanor of Aquitaine - not only having his beloved Robert of Artois assert that Eleanor "having made her first husband ... so notorious a cuckold that their marriage was dissolved, took her wanton body and her duchy to" Henry II, but then adding as a "historical note" that Eleanor was "an unfaithful princess, at least to her first husband, the King of France" - assertions that, I need not remind you, have no basis in historical evidence.)

[nothing-new-under-the-sun124]

Eleanor of Aquitaine: oh and before you head out for your game dear just remember-

Richard the Lionheart: I know I know. I love you too mom ❤️

Eleanor of Aquitaine: oh no I was gonna say that second place is first place for losers…

Richard the Lionheart:

Eleanor of Aquitaine: but yeah that too ☺️

Richard the Lionheart: sigh