The discovery in 1960 of human remains beneath the chapter house of the abbey of L'Epau near Le Mans, touched off a long debate among forensic authorities who ultimately accepted the bones as those of the abbey's founder, Berengaria of Navarre (c.1170-1230), widow of Richard I of England (r. 1189-99). The debate ended at the end of that decade with the return to the abbey of Berengaria's recumbent effigy, virtually the only extant physical trace of her life, and its replacement over her tomb. While these events were little noticed by medieval historians, many today will feel a sense of rightness at such long-delayed recognition of a nearly-forgotten woman who, albeit a bystander, was a privileged observer of mighty events in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.
Of all the medieval queens of England, Berengaria is the most obscure and consequently, one of the most fictionalized. Until publication of Trindade's monograph, researchers had to depend upon a number of unreliable works, most dating from the mid- nineteenth century: the brief and poorly documented sketch in Agnes Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England (rev. edn., London, 1851); C.A. Bloss, Heroines of the Crusades (Auburn NY, 1853); Henri Chardon, Histoire de la Reine Berengere, femme de Richard Coeur-de-Lion et dame douariere du Mans (Le Mans, 1856); and Ivan Cloulas, Berengere et Richard Coeur de Lion. Chronique d'amour et de guerre (Paris, 1999). (Mairin Mitchell's Berengaria, Enigmatic Queen of England [Burwash Weald, 1986], was written decades before publication.) Except for Chardon's contribution, the result of a dedicated local historian's labors, these works today serve chiefly as case studies in the ways past historians have viewed the lives of medieval noblewomen. This near-forgotten queen, a textbook case (as John Gillingham has shown) of medieval noble wives' roles as pawns in matrimonial diplomacy and politics, has thus remained an enigma--a blank slate, ripe for writing in by romanticizing and popularizing authors.
The main reason for the dearth of scholarly attention Berengaria has attracted is an undeniable lack of reliable information about her in the sources for Richard I's reign, a situation to some extent offset by the sources for her administration as a dowager in Le Mans, the chief town of the dower assignment ultimately confirmed to her by King John and Philip II of France. Trindade's first chapter, "Why Berengaria?" (pp. 13-28), squarely faces this paucity of information. She seeks to justify a scholarly account of Berengaria's life on the basis of the little of value has so far been written about her, albeit that circumstance results directly from the admitted lack of relevant source material. Trindade is never quite able to shake off this Catch-22 which hangs, unresolvable and unresolved, over the rest of the book.
Trindade does offer a more objective account of Berengaria's life than we have heretofore had, and on those grounds alone this book deserves careful attention. But for all her determination to give us a 'real' Berengaria, and her thorough acquaintance with recent scholarly publication of medieval queens and queenship, Trindade cannot surmount the lack of detailed information for the first half of Berengaria's life. As the book is organized according to the life course of a medieval noblewoman, starting with her ancestry (Chapter Two, "Daughters," continuing with "Bride", "Queen", and "Widow"), this means that save for the last named, her chapters are primarily extended discussions of circumstances surrounding Berengaria's life, followed by suggestions as to the roles such people and social or political factors could have played in her life, her thinking and her actions. Trindade's familiarity with recent work on medieval queenship allows her to deal convincingly with the ways in which these and other factors might have played themselves out in Berengaria's life, but in the end the reader is liable to feel that less has been said about the woman herself than about Berengaria's ancestors, her siblings, and the politics of the Plantagenet and Capetian regimes. Throughout most of Trinade's chapters, Berengaria is thus puzzlingly, indeed frustratingly, absent and silent.
Hence the value of Trindade's chapter on Berengaria's widowhood (pp. 137-82). Here we find not the neglected queen, "more prudent than beautiful", who flits in and out of accounts of Richard I's reign. Trindade is able to reveal an active and determined woman who spared no effort in asserting herself in Le Mans, confronting the bishop and chapter of the cathedral when they opposed her (to the extent that she once had to leave the town when the dean put it under interdict). From 1199 until 1220, moreover, Berengaria tenaciously petitioned Richard's successors King John (1199-1216) and Henry III, and a series of popes, for the dower rights and revenues that were hers by right. Her claims were not settled, nor the massive arrears paid her, until 1220 when she made her only trip to England, during which she attended the translation of Thomas Becket's remains at Canterbury Cathedral (a journey Trindade does not notice, leaving uncorrected a long-held but mistaken belief that Berengaria never visited England). Trindade is commendably objective in her extrapolations from this later material to Berengaria's early life, especially as we bear in mind Marion Facinger (Meade)'s warning that historians have tended to invent a youthful Eleanor of Aquitaine consonant with what is known of that queen's later years. These are treacherous waters, and Trindade negotiates them with restraint. Nonetheless, while her speculation is more informed than that of earlier writers, we learn more about the contexts of Berengaria's life than about the woman's actions or motivations. Trindade is unable to avoid the looming ongoing debate on Richard I's sexuality, in which Berengaria's childlessness has played an understandably prominent part. This debate surfaces often in Trindade's pages, and she repeats herself, verbatim, at least once (cf. pp. 68, 192). But her conclusions are, significantly, muddled: if I understand correctly, she feels that Richard did engage in homosexual relations, if only early in life when he was "juvenis"--a life stage in which, from the works of Georges Duby, John Boswell and J. L. Flandrin, she argues that casual homosexual contacts between unwed young noblemen were tolerated. On those grounds she appears to excuse any such youthful escapades, notwithstanding that it was probably in those years of his life that he sired his only known (bastard) child. Trindade figures into Richard's personality the "emotional dependence on his mother" argued by "many historians" (194), and feels that as an adult Richard was sexually ambivalent and perhaps still favored male partners, though he was capable of the conjugal relations which he perhaps resumed with Berengaria in 1195-96 after some years of separation (pp. 119-26).
But Trindade's methods raise questions: at p. 22, for example, she dismisses as apocryphal Walter of Guiseborough's [sic] account of Richard's last hours, our source for the tale that his physicians forbade him conjugal relations at that time. Nonetheless, Trindade subjects this account to detailed analysis at pp. 132-22 and from it, launches an extended "One might argue from this..." passage. At pp. 192- 93, Trindade finds in Bishop Stubbs' remarks on Richard suspicions that the king's moral life would not bear scrutiny, and then proceeds as though the opinions she has just ascribed to Stubbs offer enough evidence to argue that Richard's "attitude to marriage and sex was problematic" (to whom?). Like many current historians, Trindade fails to quote fully (71-72) a well-known passage by the contemporary chronicler Roger of Howden that reports a sudden intensifying of Richard's relationship with Philip II in 1187. In its entirety, the passage ends with a statement that Henry II's alarm at his son's intimacy with Philip led him to secure his garrisons along his frontier with France, implying that the king's alarm was less for his son's sex life than for the possibility that this newly intimate friendship heralded a military alliance against him. Trindade misses this plausible interpretation of the passage.
On the whole, the book is well conceived, thoroughly researched and annotated, and cleanly written. There is a useful index, but readers may regret the absence of maps, genealogical tables, and illustrations. Berengaria's stone effigy at L'Epau is easily as remarkable as the first Plantagenet effigies at Fontevrault, but the only glimpse we have of it is of the head and shoulders, in a reproduction no larger than some postage stamps on the back of the book jacket. This odd circumstance seems to echo the "meditation" on the tomb that is Trindade's last chapter ("Shall These Stones Speak?", pp. 183-99). This chapter includes another digression on Richard's sex life, and passes too briefly over an interesting theory that Berengaria's inability to claim the place that was hers by right--due in part to Eleanor of Aquitaine's dominance and in part to Berengaria's childlessness--led Richard's wife to become distrustful, introspective and withdrawn. This theory is worth more space than Trindade allows it; there are significant implications here for the ways in which medieval women of Berengaria's class saw themselves in relation to the high offices they entered through marriage and the means by which they maximized their benefits from it. But Trindade ends with several question marks in a row and a resonant "Perhaps", hardly the convincing summation that would suggest the author feels she has accomplished what she set out to do.
In sum, while it is cause for mild regret that Trindade suggests many salient points by omission or ambiguity rather than direct presentation, this attractive volume commendably brings together scattered sources and authorities for a poorly documented and much-romanticized life, sheds light on some of the darker corners of Berengaria's history, and will advance discussion of queenship as an institution susceptible to the moulding of individual women as they perceived the particular circumstances in which they found themselves. It is a welcome addition to a growing corpus of monographs on medieval queens.