The full title of this book is ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England’. Yale published this book in 2009 and this survey recognises it as the first of the English Monarchs “Companion Titles” - a book not in the series itself, but just outside the canon and distinguishable only because its subject was not an anointed monarch of England. As is so typical of Yale biographies in this series, Turner has the advantage of new sources not available to earlier scholars and has produced a biography worthy of accompanying the English Monarchs series without being a member of it. Turner references such occurrences in Alison Weir’s 1999 biography, for example. In analysing her, he knocks down the many fabrications of the past, and exposes the un-researched repetitions of earlier critics, carelessly inserted into modern accounts as fact. With this in mind, Professor Turner comes to the subject to create the first solid academic study of Eleanor by going back to the primary documents. Eight hundred years later her life is still discussed and analysed. Even in her lifetime she was the target of both praise and condemnation. In King Richard’s absence she served England as his regent. In France she bore her first husband King Louis VII two daughters and in England as the wife of Henry II was the mother of three daughters and five sons, two of them kings. A feminist icon? A Queen of Romance? An Amazonian? A lioness? A “Jezebel” figure, as the early monks portrayed her?īy any measure she is an important figure in two kingdoms. She is a famous identity in history but at the same time an image shaped by whatever lens through which one chooses to view her. Eleanor is an elusive subject for biography.
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