Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said - by Karen Sullivan (Hardcover)

About the Book

"We have nothing of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124-1204) written by the queen herself. Yet there is no shortage of books about her, no dearth of commentators speculating about her life, and no lack of readers eager to know more about what motivated this powerful, twelfth-century woman. What we do have, and what scholars have made use of over the centuries, are more than a hundred stories ("histories") about Eleanor from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that mention her in passing, but that end up being an odd mixture of fact and fiction. As Karen Sullivan reminds us in this book, it is telling that the medieval writers of these stories were always careful to qualify their accounts of Eleanor with the tag "it was said," acknowledging that they were merely repeating stories already in circulation. Further, we possess a dozen other accounts ("parahistories," as Sullivan calls them)-love songs, ballads, romances, anecdotes, treatises, and epistles from the period-all of which purport to tell us something of this queen. Fantastical as so many of the medieval tales about Eleanor may seem, for Sullivan, they tell us certain truths about what was possible for a woman in twelfth-century France, certain expectations buried in the fantasies, and those truths, as much as can be known at our great remove, are the subject of this book. Sullivan offers a new method to read, not through the historical records, as earlier scholars have done, but in them. For Sullivan, the challenge for us in trying to understand Eleanor is not to translate the vocabulary of the Middle Ages, with its privileging of terms like morality and prudence, into our own contemporary notions of political power, but to do the opposite: namely, to entertain, if only for a time, the conceptual categories in which medieval people organized their world. For twenty-first century readers, Sullivan suggests, the aim is not to bring Eleanor into our world, but to take ourselves into hers. Through intensive close readings of both the historical and parahistorical records, Sullivan challenges earlier characterizations of the queen, giving us a different way to understand Eleanor, her motivations, and actions. The book will be read by experts on Eleanor and medieval queenship, by scholars in medieval history and literature, and those interested in gender studies, as well as by a number of specialists in other aspects of the Middle Ages, in the crusades, for example, or courtly love, troubadour poetry, motherhood and inheritance, and monastic spirituality. It will also appeal to a number of general readers who are always interested in the life of this remarkable woman"--

Book Synopsis

A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "it was said," or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired. While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveals about this queen and life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. She reads the Middle Ages, not to impose our current conceptual categories on its culture, but to expose the conceptual categories medieval women used to make sense of their lives. Along the way, Sullivan paints a fresh portrait of this singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world.

Review Quotes

"Sullivan considers, in succession, these elements of Eleanor's life: her position as heiress, her ability to consent to marriage, her behavior during the Second Crusade, her efforts as a literary patron, her activities as queen mother, her final years, and her presentation in modern literary works. . . . The research behind Sullivan's endeavor is tremendous."-- "Mediaevistik"

"A distinctive perspective on Eleanor, which tells us more about how she has been perceived than it does about her life."
-- "English Historical Review"

"Sullivan takes an unusual approach in this study of the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine: as well as the known factual history she focuses heavily on what various informal chroniclers and writers of romances have said about her over the centuries - "it is said [ut dicitur]" - i.e. how Eleanor was perceived as well as the straight facts."-- "Fortean Times"

"Historians​ usually exclude gossip and rumor from their sources, or use them with caution. In her new book about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Karen Sullivan does the opposite. She looks at what friends, enemies, troubadours and chroniclers as late as the 16th century had to say, often relaying it with the phrase ut dicebatur, 'as it was said'. . . . Moving between fact, rumor and outright fiction, Sullivan traces Eleanor's reputation through five phases of her career: as heiress, crusader, patroness of poets, queen mother and aged affiliate of Fontevraud, the nunnery where she is buried."--Barbara Newman "London Review of Books"

"A fascinating must-read for all enthusiasts of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Sullivan conducts a survey of Eleanor's life via a detailed focus on the main historical controversies. The author does not 'pick a side, ' but instead asks all of us to revisit our preconceptions of this most inspiring medieval queen. The book manages the neat trick of providing much food for thought while being a highly enjoyable read. I look forward to rereading it already!"--Sara Cockerill, author of 'Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires'

"A remarkable portrait of Eleanor as the subject of a thousand conversations, this book gives us the queen who haunted the listeners of troubadour songs, shone in the biographies of famous knights, and burned from the acid pens of her enemies. As she weaves these disparate strands together, Sullivan blazes a new trail in the study of celebrated figures in the medieval past, challenging us to rethink assumptions about what is useful about the forces that shaped medieval narratives and how we might read them."--Nicholas Paul, Fordham University

"This evocative book, both solidly documented and full of original ideas, renews studies on Eleanor of Aquitaine. Reading medieval and modern texts on the queen with finesse and respect, Sullivan takes us into the mentality of their authors, whose interests, sensibilities, and values are at once so close to and yet so far from ours. Piercing the silence that surrounds women of the twelfth century, this book opens the door to a culture of gender so often forgotten."--Martin Aurell, University of Poitiers

About the Author

Karen Sullivan is the Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Culture and Literature at Bard College. She is the author of many books, including The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions, also published by the University of Chicago Press.