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time, and to a whirlwind progress through the fairest and most exciting of Europe's principalities, the Aquitaine, where scholarship, heresy, beauty, and all the cultivated arts survived in a way that made the foggy north and Paris seem the dismal cultural backwater that it was.
As well as being given an unequalled exposure to the hurly burly of the political world of her time, Eleanor was educated in formal fashion. Her appearance in Amazonian guise at the launching of the Second Crusade is proof in itself of her grounding in the classics, such as they were in those times before the rediscoveries of the Renaissance. She therefore had skills in the reading of Latin, which she may also have known how to write, although as a princess and later a queen she usually had secretaries to do her writing for her. 9. Thus, her famous attack on the Church for its indifference to her needs during the Third Crusade was probably in the hand of her secretary Peter of Blois.
And her own daughter, Marie de Champagne, although a patron of arts and letters in her own right, gave her ideas to the troubadour Chretien de Troyes to be penned. As a result, the ideas of Marie eventually developed through the agency of another writer into the first great telling of the romantic stories of Sir Lancelot and Sir Percival.
Great women may not have called upon their formal education as frequently as their counterparts today.
Nevertheless, formal schooling was probably the least part of Eleanor's learning. Rather, the whole Aquitaine - that glittering, dark world - was the school of Eleanor, just as most women of the age probably gained their learning through direct experiences in a world that was bloodstained, brutal, and terrifying, but rarely dull.
1. Coulton, "From School To University" in Medieval Panorama, p.7.
2. Ibid., p.11.
3. B. Radice (trans.), The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, pp.71-2.
4. S. Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life Routledge, London, 1990, p.32.
5. Ibid., p.32.
6. Bowie and Davies, Hildegard: Anthology, p. 127.
7. Ross and McLaughlin, Portable Medieval Reader, pp.635-40.
8. Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine, p.10.
9. D.Seward, Eleanor of Aquitaine: The Mother Queen David and Charles, London, 1978, p.18.
Chapter 18:
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