Eleanor of Aquitaine (Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires)

In the competition for remarkable queens, Eleanor of Aquitaine tends to win. In fact her story sometimes seems so extreme it ought to be made up. The headlines: orphaned as a child, Duchess in her own right, Queen of France, crusader, survivor of a terrible battle, kidnapped by her own husband, kidnapped by pirates, divorced for barrenness, Countess of Anjou, Queen of England, mother of at least five sons and five daughters, rebel against her own husband, prisoner for fifteen years, ruler of England in her own right, traveller across the Pyrenees and Alps in winter in her seventies, and mentor to the most remarkable Queen medieval France was to know (her own granddaughter, obviously).It might be thought that this material would need no embroidery. But the reality is that Eleanor of Aquitaine’s life has been subjected to successive reinventions over the years, with the facts often losing the battle with speculation and wishful thinking.In this biography Sara Cockerill has gone back to the primary sources, and the wealth of recent first rate scholarship, and assessed which of the claims about Eleanor can be sustained on the evidence. The result is a complete re-evaluation of this remarkable woman’s even more remarkable life. A number of often repeated myths are debunked and a fresh version of Eleanor emerges. In addition Sara Cockerill has added her own research, breaking new ground on Eleanor’s relationship with the Church, her supposed antipathy to Thomas Becket and her relationships with all of her children, including her family by her first marriage."