Eleanor of Aquitaine: who was she? Was she power-hungry? A lustful “demon wife”? A convenient scapegoat for her husbands and their chroniclers? A rewarder of worthy men? A fiercely loyal mother? An excellent judge of character? A free spirit? What better scholar to tackle these questions than Karen Sullivan, who has done a similar examination of Joan of Arc (in her brilliant The Interrogation of Joan of Arc) and is known for repeatedly examining what we can really know about supposed historical “truths” (cf. Truth and the Heretic or The Danger of Romance).
Sullivan’s big contribution with this book is to describe Eleanor of Aquitaine “as it was said,” i.e., to set all of the “historical” texts about Eleanor’s life (chronicles, charters, letters) next to all of the “parahistorical texts” (troubadour songs, literature, romance, ballads, exempla, vidas, literary epistles) (10). In providing the complete source record, Sullivan’s point is that “ambiguous evidence...remains nonetheless evidence” (80) --that to disregard any of these sources is to lose one’s ability to fully comprehend Eleanor. Sullivan wants to move Eleanor’s story out of the facts-only realm (i.e., “something that did or did not occur”) and into the facts +speculation realm (“something that may have occurred”) (91), because it’s not only modern historianswho have to discern between truth and fiction when it comes to the famous queen: while she was living, Eleanor herself had to regularly contend with (and use to her advantage) speculations and mythologies about her.
In her book, Sullivan takes Eleanor’s five major historical identities (heiress, crusader, courtly lady, queen mother, conversa) and explores them in separate chapters, weaving together a fabric of primary source quotations. In her final chapter, Sullivan traces some of Eleanor’s reception history in subsequent early modern and modern histories--from Renaissance plays to twentieth-century movies--to show modern readers how we have become unable to see Eleanor as her medieval peers would have and unable to analyze her actions with the standards and mores most appropriate to her time.
There are lovely and expertly subtle points sprinkled amidst the source quotations in each chapter. For instance, Sullivan’s linguistic analysis about the use of rapere in sources is a fascinating commentary on the extent to which female consent was required (even if choice wasn’t) in political marriages of the time (37). She has a great argument that courtly literature was intentionally enigmatic and vague, and so references to Eleanor perhaps having love affairs should not be evaluated with modern historical standards but rather should be seen as part and parcel of this medieval genre. I relished her point that “the absence of positive knowledge about the queen’s private life, though a source of frustration for historians, is what protect[ed] her from reprisals” (91), though I do wish that Sullivan had extended her expert linguistic and subtle literary analysis to the emotion terms that she only cites in English from the sources, like “anger” (e.g. 31, 57) and “love” (e.g., 93, 95, 99, 113, 195).
Some write scholarship to collect painstaking, exhaustive research in one tome so that subsequent historians have access to all of the source evidence. Others write history to tell a good story. Sullivan has determined that such an (often unfairly) storied woman as Eleanor of Aquitaine finally deserves the first type of history: a book where the impressive source apparatus is exposed as the rich, vague, contradictory complex that it is, even if it means that no single analysis becomes clearly delineated. This is quite a feat! But, as a result, the reader is left a bit bewildered. I deeply respect Sullivan’s desire to leave us in a state of ambiguity about where one should fall on the issue(s) of Eleanor. Given the myriad (mis)interpretations about Eleanor’s life and character, the impressive labyrinth of sources Sullivan provides seems appropriate, and the resulting confusion about what the story was becomes a kind of experiential thesis: I closed the book filled with uncertainty, which I think was Sullivan’s intent. Nevertheless, I longed for decisive analysis, perhaps because I (anachronistically) read Eleanor’s actions as so bold that I craved a definitive argument worthy of her valiant character, but also because I wanted more clarity about the biases Sullivan was attempting to reveal in the source base. Why were chroniclers against Eleanor early in her life, and more forgiving later (75)? How did source biases map onto gender constructs in Eleanor’s circles at the time? How did Eleanor compare with other female heiresses, duchesses, queens, mothers, political wives, etc.? Were sons always trusting of their queen mothers with the intensity that Richard and John were of Eleanor? These questions remain unanswered but could have been helpful for the Conclusion, when Sullivan insists in the very last line of the book that “we can appreciate the feminisms of the Middle Ages, which are so different from our own” (203); I’m not sure that I quite know what she means without having more systematically considered whether Eleanor was remarkable (or not) in a wider gender-historical context.
That last line seems to hint that Sullivan actually does have a story of her own about Eleanor, though she tries to bury it in between the lines in her book. Starting at Chapter Four, a subtle thesis emerges: that Eleanor was a public figure as a mother of kings and a ruler of subjects, and thus saw all of her actions (divorce, marriage, betrayal, beneficence, affection, etc.) in light of this all-encompassing role: “moral character was, not just a private matter, but a public area of concern” (201). Because of our modern misperceptions (e.g., that she would have been preoccupied with private morality, or that private feelings were shared between royal family members), Sullivan explains, we lose sight of this fact. If this is true, I wish Sullivan had proven this to us more forcefully and systematically and with contemporary comparanda, or with a more thematic sorting of the sources she quotes throughout the book. For as it stands now, readers are given an invaluable feat of research in Sullivan’s book, but are also left having to take her analysis at face value, one interpretation from among the cacophony of possibilities. Given the terrific job Sullivan’s book does early on attacking past historians for their selective interpretations of Eleanor, I fear she has planted so much distrust in her readers of any singular interpretation of Eleanor of Aquitaine, even if it’s Sullivan’s own.