Eleanor of Aquitaine

Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and later of England, lived at a time when women had few rights, yet she became one of the key political figures of the twelfth century. The mother of both Richard the Lionhearted and the villainous King John, Eleanor was responsible for disturbing the balance of power in Europe when she divorced the king of France to marry Henry Plantagenet - a disruption that required 300 years of warfare to remedy. Her life was played out against the tumult of the Crusades, the struggle between the Church and the state, and the burgeoning of a European feminist movement. Marion Meade skillfully negotiates the labyrinthine complexities of the era to give us a scholarly, exceptionally readable biography of a woman the male-dominated historical records called everything from bitch, to harlot, to monster - an indefatigable woman of enormous intelligence and titanic energy who refused to be bound by the restrictions of her sex.