Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said

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 reveal about this queen and about life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. This book paints a fresh portrait of a singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world.

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

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.

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