Customer Reviews
Eleanor - the Invisible Woman - By: John Fitzpatrick, 17 Dec 2008 
Some years ago I read Alison's Weir's biography of Elizabeth I of England & found it well written & interesting. As a Scotsman & a Catholic, I was less impressed by her account of how she treated Mary, Queen of Scotland, whom she murdered as she did so many of Catholic English subjects who were treated as traitors merely because of their religion. However, let us not let this subjective view detract from the fact that the book was good & Elizabeth was certainly an impressive monarch & represented the true face of English nationalism - insular, insecure & ruthless, with an iron fist beneath the proffered cup of tea & cucumber sandwich.
In comparison, Weir's biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine is pretty thin & hard going. The main reason is simply that very little is actually known about Eleanor apart from some historical bits & bobs & dry financial information. She must have been a remarkable woman & she had an interesting life split between her realmsin France & England & even went on a Crusade to the Holy Land. However, the fact is that there is just so little information about her that Weir devotes more space to her royal husbands & her son, Richard the Lionheart, & pads out the story with dull accounts of the contemporary life, e.g. a description so the castles she visited. Thankfully, unlike so many modern writers, she does not pretend to have discovered new facts or shocking information. The style is good but there is simply not enough there. This book is not really worth the effort.
A highly readbale account of a Beautiful, wilful, strong, intelligent and passionate woman - By: Gary Selikow, 16 Oct 2008 
Eleanor of Aquitaine was the queen of Louis VII of France & later Henry II of England. she was the mother of two English kings, Richard the Lionheart & John. France & England fought for many years over her vast French estates.
Eleanor was one of the most fable women of the Middle Ages & also one of the more controversial.
Beautiful, wilful, strong, intelligent, passionate & a famed lover. Much scandal was attached to her name, much of it with more than a little substance.
She seems to have had more than a few paramours while married to both kings, including Geoffrey of Anjou, father to her second husband, Henry II of England, while she was still married to Louis VI of France.
She was a great patron of troubadour poetry, inspiring some great & passionately expressed ballads.
she lived to be 82 but it was only towards the end of her life that she overcame the adversities & tragedies of her earlier years & became the de facto ruler of England.
The nuns of Fontrevault recordedin their necrology a glowing but conventional tribute to their late patroness, who had been a paragon among women & 'illuminated the world with the brilliance of her royal progeny, She graced the nobility of her birth with the honesty of her life, enriched it with her royal excellence, & adorned it with the flowers of her virtues, & her renown fr unmatched goodness she surpassed almost all the queens of the world'.
Sadly it was often the scandals associated with her youth, & not the wisdom of her stewardship of England during the reign of her sons that is remembered. Yet many ballads & stories have been attached to her namein the 800 years following her passing.
this was writtenin all sincerity because they knew herin her venerable old age.
We learn much of the role of womenin Medieval nobility. In Eleanor's day, women were supposed to be chaste both inside & outside marriage, virginity & chastity being highly prized states. When it came to fornication women were usually apportioned the blame because they were descendants of Eve who had tempted Adamin the Garden of Eden. Promiscuity & brought great shame upon a women, including fines, social ostracism, & evenin the case of royal & aristocratic women, execution. Women who engagedin sexual activity prior to marriage devalued themselves on the marriage market as no one wanted to 'buy' what they regarded as 'soiled goods'.
Such archaic & narrow minded views of women have for the most part withered awayin Western society today but remain the orderin Islamic societies.
Incarcerated & restricted during the reign of her husband Henry II, she played a powerful role under Richard & John, exhorting the Pope to see that Richard was freed while being held prisoner by the Duke of Austria & opposing the destructive power of Bishop William Longchamp of Ely. during Richard's reign, while Prince John acted as regent, while Richard was away on the crusades.
We learn oft he crusades, one of which Eleanor herself went on with Henry II, not long after their marriage, causing much scandal along the way, & engagingin conflict with her king, due to the scandals around her activities, while witnessing the great events of the crusade across Europe & the battles fought between the Crusaders & Muslimsin the Holy Land.
I don't think that this book was at all dull or 'text booky'.
On the contrary it teaches the reader a great deal about the life & times of Eleanor of Aquitaine, & her husbands & children, while reading smoothly & interestedly like a novel. It marvelously brings the life of Eleanor to vividity, & the times she livedin to life, exploring a wide range of emotions, feelings, colours an sounds, while always making clear what is fact & what is unknown, legend or myth.
The author does not hesitate from strongly expressing her own opinions but on the other hand is honest about the grey areas where there is indeed no clear answer.
A difficult thing to do for a non fiction history, but one that clearly marks one
It is filled with many interesting facts & legends, which the author is clear to distinguish.
For example the author refutes the myth that Eleanor had Henry II's mistress Rosamund Clifford, & also does not give credence to Eleanor having presided over the fabled Courts of Love.
She also refutes the rumours that Richard I was a homosexual.
This narrative is highly readable, an account of a fascinating & strong-willed women & queen.
By the Wrath of God, Queen of England - By: Ian David Curry, 04 Jan 2008 
Some of the most fascinating charactersin history hail from the murkier depths of times lacking much documentary sources. Perhaps their interest comes from this patchwork of conflicting sources, or perhaps the temporal distance lends enchantment. It also presents a problem for the biographer,in that the lack of sources makes it difficult to write authoritatively on the subject. If the subject is a mystery then the book can't be much more than conjectures joined up with speculation.
Eleanor of Aquitaine occupies an odd placein such a time. As a ruler & heiressin her own right, & as queen of France & later England, her life is much more richly documented than most of her contemporaries. Her movements, lodgings, nutrition & clothing can be conjured from the surviving accounts. Richer detail comes from monastic accounts, surviving letters & a good deal of conjecture based on related sources.
Weir has chosen a fascinating subject. She was a woman ruler at a time when women's right to rule was far from established, &in many areas banned by Salic Law. She was forthright, independent & had unorthodox views that capture the essence of the troubadour culture that flourishedin her Aquitanian provinces.
Eleanor was wife of Louis VII of France, & then Henry II of England. She was mother to Richard the Lion Heart, & of King John. She herself went on crusade, appearing as the Amazonian queen Penthesilea to rally the troops. She lived as everything from Queen to prisoner, & did so over a remarkable 82 years.
As a writer of engaging `popular' history, Weir has been criticised for dumbing down the subject. In my opinion this is ridiculous. The idea that a book need be impenetrable & complex to be worthy of the appellation `academic' strikes me as simply the fulmination of the historical profession seeking to ensure the plebs don't scale the ivory towers. Whilst Weir's book may not push too many boundaries, it does present its subject well, contextualises admirably & is properly referenced with what source material survives.
The dearth of source material is shown by Weir quotingin full the surviving letters from Eleanor to the pope at the time of Henry II's capture & imprisonment at the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor. As these are the most extensive extant sources it is not difficult to see why they have been quotedin full. But quotations of this lengthin a work of popular narrative history do somewhat stall the flow of the read. This is a minor point, & Weir compensates by ensuring most of the narrative is writtenin an engaging & pacey style. Some might sniff at such a tome, but if you have an interestin history you will be rewarded with a fascinating insight.
Conversations with Eleanor - By: Gerald T. Walford, 20 Nov 2007 This is one of very few books which gets my unreserved recommendation- it is brilliant! Weir fills out the few known facts about Eleanor with side-details from all aspects of twelfth life: political, cultural, social, religious, poetic, courtly, fiscal....and far from a dull list of events the facts bounce off each other to create an astonishingly dynamic & real image, with al the contradictions & idiosyncracies of a real person. Weirs book is more than a borrowing & accumulation of facts- the sum is more than the parts & given the parts are dramatic indeed the end result is an utter triumph of historical vision, clearly yet lyrically told.
A waste of paper - By: Vivie, 15 Sep 2007 
How anyone can make Eleanor of Acquitaine dull & present her as conventional (by the standard of Eleanor's contemporaries) is beyond my understanding but Alison Weir succeeds. Worse her history is bad, her analysis weak & her prose turgid. I know she is popular but on the strength of this book it is really difficult to see why; I struggled to read it to the end.
