Eleanor Of Aquitaine: By the Wrath of God, Queen of England

Product Information

Readers care passionately about accuracy, and whenever you depart from history into myth or legend you must justify it. In 1125, he was made Abbot of St Gildas-de-Rhuys in his native Brittany, and gave the Paraclete to Heloise and her sister nuns. She commanded that the harsh and hated forest laws should be relaxed, and pardoned felons who had been caught trespassing or poaching in the royal forests. Latterly, I have had a much happier experience working on Jean Anouilh's ‘Becket’, about to open in the West End.

She says: 'It all began in 1965 when I read a book about Henry Vlll's first wife, Katherine of Aragon.She travelled the kingdom extensively, dispensing justice and receiving homage, and the nobles obeyed her unhesitatingly, aware of her formidable reputation.

The tragic love story of Peter Abelard and Heloise has been celebrated by historians, artists, poets and novelists for eight centuries.

Overall, this is a solid, tight and clean, Near Fine copy in a Very Good+ slipcase, which is lightly rubbed, and has some mild wear to the edges and corners. The bulk of this book explores Eleanor of Aquitaine’s married life, first to King Louis VII of France and then to King Henry II of England. Having published seven books over a period of only ten years how did you become interested in history? I would love to do Queen Victoria but owing to the saturation of books on her life, that won't be yet.

Indeed, he issued a general edict to the princes of the realm, that the Queen’s word should be law in all matters. When you finish the book you feel you have been put painlessly (but not necessarily without tears) in possession of the facts about this extraordinary, indefatigable woman. Given the dramatic licence inherent in any historical dramas, I would say that both films are legitimate treatments of their subjects, if not in the letter, certainly in the spirit. Well I loved Aristocrats, and the television adaptation was wonderful, and although the genre's out of fashion I love historical fiction. Before becoming a published author in 1989, 1 was a civil servant, and then a full-time housewife and mother.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. Her example teaches us to celebrate the wisdom and ability of older people, and to aim for an active and fulfilling life for as long as we are able. 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. It was the winner of the Good Book Guide award for the best biography of 1999, as voted for by readers in 100 countries.

His successor, the Yorkist King Edward IV, came there for the hunting, as did his brother Richard III, during his coronation progress in 1483, and his rival and successor, Henry VII, first sovereign of the House of Tudor. 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. Alison Weir has written a vivid biography which is also an impressive piece of detective work, for she has scrutinised the evidence to produce a credible and balanced account of the life of an extraordinary woman.This book charts the early lives of Henry and Eleanor before they became a European power couple and examines the impact of their union on contemporaries and European politics. During the first half of Richard’s ten-year reign – for much of which he was abroad - Eleanor was, after him, the chief power in the realm. Was there anything in the writing of The Life of Elizabeth I that made you naturally turn to Eleanor as your next subject? There are many things that eluded me - and would elude every other person who wants to find out the truth about Eleanor: what she really looked like, her relationships with her husbands and children, the truth about her rumoured sexual adventures, her reasons for separating from Henry II, her whereabouts and activities during the years in which she merits no mention in the sources, and the true extent of her political powers.