Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England (review)

One of the most famous women of the Middle Ages, Eleanor of Aquitaine has no shortage of biographers. Their works fill American libraries, which hardly keep up with those multiplying in French. Ralph Turner knows what they say, especially with respect to "mythology" and what he calls the "black legend" (cover text) of a frivolous and licentious queen. But his real interest lies in the sources of knowledge, in stripping away such legends in quest of a more accurate Eleanor.

His results command respect. From a lifetime's research on Plantagenet ways and means, Turner has a sure hand in the evidence. His Eleanor is persuasive in three ways. She is the grand protagonist of a historic Poitevin civilization, ever insistent on its claims and her own inheritance. Second, she was, whenever possible, a working queen. Gaining experience alongside King Louis VII in the 1140s, she pressed King Henry II for the responsibility he soon learned to distrust or withhold. Repeatedly, his queen regained (as well as lost) her initiatives, to the extent of achieving virtual regencies after Henry's death in 1189. Third, and most successfully, Turner brings out the implications of Eleanor's astonishing stamina and longevity. Her support for Richard and John not only helped them through dangerous crises of power and succession but also exemplified her humanely maternal instincts (and energy) and her wisdom in old age. The "black legend" wholly misses the point, Turner justly concludes.

The strength of this book owes much to its author's conception of Eleanor's place in successive societies of power. Whether it is her paternal Aquitaine, her bridal France, or her long and troubled Angevin attachments, her life is set forth in its social contexts. The book is quite as much a history of courtly power as of personality; an alternative history—and a good one—of Henry II and his sons. Yet it is not quite, whether Turner sees this or not, a "political" history. He is sparing with this modifier, to his credit. Yet he retains it (e.g., p. 107), and he writes of "governing" throughout, while saying next to nothing about lordship. The book is wedded to an old and anachronistic consensus that power in the twelfth century was like that in most modern societies: an experience of government and the state. Yet what Turner's evidence unfailingly shows is that Eleanor's ways with power look not at all like those of Eleanor Roosevelt. How is this to be made clear? Is it enough simply to allow that "government" and "politics" have ever-changing meanings in history? So many readers still seem content with this escape that criticism here is far from condemnation. So what was distinctive about Eleanor of Aquitaine's power? Because Turner says little about her experience of lordship and nothing at all of how this amounted to "governing," his book quite overlooks one of the most characteristic historical realities of her age.

Yet the author is impressively familiar with the primary sources. He is not very close to them, for his citations reveal a heavy dependence on secondary scholarship. This is, in fact, a virtue of the book, because the huge industry of modern work on Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Plantagenets renders hazardous any attempt to go it alone with sources. Turner deploys his evidence with skills born of experience. Perhaps his most remarkable success, even if achieved in a correct academic prose wholly devoid of rhetoric, is the exercise of historical imagination. Obliged throughout to place his subject in location or circumstance just where the evidence fails, Turner evokes Eleanor virtually day by day through a tumultuously historic lifetime.