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Introduction: Defining Queenship in Medieval Europe IN 1148 RUMORS SURFACED that Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of King Louis VII of France, was involved in an adulterous love affair with her uncle, Raymond ofAntioch. Eleanor had accompanied her husband on the second Crusade, and during the couple's stay in the Holy Land stories began to circulate about the queen's close relationship to her uncle. John ofSalisbury reported that "the attentions paid by the prince to the queen, and his constant, indeed almost continuous, conversation with her, aroused the king's suspicions."1 William of Tyre's account of the events focused on the queen's complicity . He wrote that Raymond, frustrated in his effort to enlist Louis's aid in enlarging the principality of Antioch, resolved to deprive Louis of his wife, "either by force or by secret intrigue. The queen readily assented to this design, for she was a foolish woman."2 Eleanor was never formally charged with adultery, and the rumored liaison did not end the royal marriage. The king and queen were apparendy reconciled by the pope when they stopped in Italy after leaving Antioch, and the queen gave birth to a daughter in 1150. Despite the "reconciliation;' however, Eleanor and Louis were divorced three years after the events at Antioch on grounds ofconsanguinity.3 Eleanor of Aquitaine's story provides a provocative starting point for a study of the prominent representation of adulterous queens in medieval romances. Eleanor herself has long been associated with medieval love literature as both a patron and amodel, and it is possible that Eleanor's experiences may have been well enough 2 Introduction known to have influenced accounts of queenship in medieval romances ; the rumors ofthe queen's adultery predate by about twentyfive years the composition of the first major French romance about an adulterous queen, Chretien de Troyes's Chevalier de la charrete, a work whose patron was Eleanor's daughter, Marie of Champagne.4 Whatever direct personal influence Eleanor of Aquitaine may have had on literary accounts of adulterous queens must remain speculative , however, and the rumors of Eleanor's adulterous liaison with Raymond of Antioch are more interesting for what they might say about medieval queenship than for what they might suggest about this queen's life as a model for fictional representations. The reports of Eleanor's conduct in Antioch stress the importance of the queen's chastity, the threat to the king's honor that could be posed by his wife's sexual transgression, and the importance of undisputed succession in the royal family. All ofthese issues are featured in romance representations ofqueenship and adultery. The prominence of adultery in many medieval romances has long preoccupied literary scholars and historians. Critics have idealized adultery as part of the ethic of courtly love, justified it as a reaction to the practice of arranged marriages, or simply dismissed it as a literary conceit with no connection to historical situations.5 Adultery has yet to be studied as a sexual transgression associated primarily with the queen in medieval romance, and the political implications ofthat association remain unexamined. Medieval romanciers do not simply rewrite the stories of Capetian queens like Eleanor of Aquitaine in veiled form. However, they do represent, sometimes obliquely, many of the issues debated in the evolution of queenship during the period in which they were composed: the importance of chastity and succession in royal marriage; the extent of a royal wife's influence on her husband; the symbolic importance of the queen in the display ofthe king's sovereignty. This study situates romance representations of adulterous queens in the context of medieval monarchy and in relationship to a changing notion ofqueenship in twelfthand thirteenth-century France. It focuses on common issues at stake in the fiction and the practice ofmedieval queenship, and it suggests Defining Queenship in Medieval Europe 3 the contribution of medieval romances to the evolving definition of royal sovereignty as exclusively male. Defining Queenship In medieval Europe most queens were queens consort; that is, a woman was crowned only when she married a king or when her husband became king. In early medieval monarchies the queen's position was a precarious and vulnerable one. In Merovingian France, for example , the queen's position in the court was defined entirely by her marriage. There was no special inaugural rite for the queen and her dependence on her husband was complete. Janet Nelson has emphasized the difficulty of identifying "queenship" as an institution during...

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