Power of a Woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Eleanor of Aquitaine: her quest to realize feminine power

by Robert Fripp, author of Power of a Woman

Imagine Paris at the time of Eleanor of Aquitaine. It is not enough to sense the physical fabric, the sights, smells, sounds, the unpaved mud. You must dress in the mind-set of the 1140s in a way of looking at the world that is alien to modern perception. An important aspect of Eleanor's turbulent, productive life was her contribution to realizing feminine power (or influence) in the medieval period. To raise the profile of women she struggled against steep odds. Just over a century earlier, prelates of the Church had debated the question: did women have souls?

A good place to enter twelfth century Paris is through the mind of Abbé Bernard of Clairvaux. During the reign of Eleanor's monkish first husband, King Louis VII, Bernard was among the most powerful, certainly the most influential, of men. His Christianity was hierarchical. He stressed adherence to the doctrines of Church Fathers who had lived many centuries before. He demanded absolute faith, the sort of faith that brooked no questioning, no original thought. He had trained himself to ignore earthly beauty: it distracted from communion with the Holy Spirit. He stressed obedience above all to the Church.

Into this repressed environment ventured Peter Abelard, preaching that absolute faith must be questioned, that Christian witness should be based on personal experience, not received as ancient absolutes. Abelard's reforming spirit had to be crushed, and it was, twice, the second time by Bernard.

Eleanor of Aquitaine had spend her first fifteen, formative, years in the more relaxed atmosphere of her grandfather's and her father's courts, in Poitou and Aquitaine. Bordeaux in particular was a trading port, open to Jewish and Muslim merchants and the crews of galleys from the eastern Mediterranean. The Christianity of Eleanor's upbringing was more questioning than absolute. It was also leavened with bardic entertainment, music, song and the verse of troubadours. Eleanor's crusading grandfather had been the first troubadour.

Eleanor's years in Paris as the queen of France must have been marked by her struggle to assert her independent spirit and win space for the intellectual freedoms she had known in Poitou and Aquitaine. Given the strictures of her first ten years in Paris (1137-1147), it was no wonder when, in 1146, she fought to take herself and her women on crusade. Consent came at a high price: Eleanor's purse paid for half the force that marched to Constantinople, Antioch and then Jerusalem. Likely, her intuition told her that the ethos in Palestine would be freer, more like that of Bordeaux than of Paris. So it proved.

By the time the Church annulled Eleanor's marriage to Louis VII, in 1152 (after her frequent urging) she had spent fifteen years enduring the disapproval of Louis' cabinet of clerics, notably the ascetic Bernard. Her second marriage, just weeks later, to Henry of Anjou (the future Henry II of England) subjected Eleanor to a different sort of male domination: Henry was a womanizer to a degree extraordinary even for the times. At first he managed affairs with discretion, until he met Rosamond de Clifford, "Fair Rosamond" as history recalls her.

In 1167, after thirty years spent in courts that revolved around two very different husbands, Eleanor abandoned Henry, packed her household into seven ships and returned to one of her own major cities, Poitiers. There, she established and presided over her Court of Ladies and wrote her Code of Poitiers. Historians still debate the precise nature of Eleanor's Court, but it is clear that she strove to build an ethos that would raise the status of women in the male-centric world of her day.

Eleanor declared her Code of Poitiers in the shadow of the tower that her grandfather built. Duke Guilhem X of Aquitaine, the "Troubadour" (who was also Count Guilhem VIII of Poitou) had established a reputation: as a crusader; as a womanizer; and as the very first troubadour. Eleanor's Code set guidelines by which domestic affairs and affairs of the heart would be arbitrated and settled, by women.

Although Eleanor was the mother of nine children by two kings, during her years in Poitiers she took on the role of tutor to the offspring of noble families, some of which were at war with each other. Eleanor's court was neutral ground. Her great hall, which still stands, brimmed with youth during her years there. Contemporary males, often clerics, wrote dismissively of Eleanor's Court of Ladies. However, in her own terms, she was trying to recreate the birthright of women she had known from her youth in Poitou and Aquitaine, "as persons equal to men, not in might, but in nature, in virtue, in soul" (Power of a Woman, Chapter 26). The late Claude Marks, the author of Pilgrims, Heretics, and Lovers, expressed that opinion of Eleanor's work at Poitiers.

Eleanor's Code of Poitiers may have been influenced by the life of that city's patron saint, Radegonde. In the year 538, the violent King Clotaire had decided to take Radegonde as one of his wives. With two female companions, she fled. Clotaire, meanwhile, murdered her brother to extinguish her family's royal line. The first miracle associated with Radegonde is that, while being chased, she took shelter in a field of corn, which sprang up, hiding the women from view. Radegonde became a nun, founded a monastery at Tours and settled at Poitiers. Poitevins associate a second miracle with Radegonde: Clotaire agreed to a separation and provided funds to build the convent of Ste. Croix.

From then on, Radegonde lived on two levels: as a nun who tended the sick and salved the stumps of lepers; and as a noble lady who encouraged a lively social and cultural life. She forged a platonic love with a scholar, Fortunatus, who wrote the book by which Eleanor knew her.

Eleanor removed herself from King Henry's court almost exactly halfway through his troubles with Thomas Becket. Becket was the chancellor who had lived for mortal extravagance until Henry appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury. After that, he became the model of austerity. Eleanor would certainly have considered Henry's and Becket's relationship a failed model -- Becket was murdered in 1170, while Eleanor held court in Poitiers.

Then there was Henry's relationship with his mistress which Eleanor describes in Power of a Woman: "This Rosamond Clifford smote Henry as no paramour had possessed him before? The fool confused the hurt in his loins for love! Love, mark me! Henry in his lust was so confused that he squandered his love, the quality by which men attach each other, on a woman!" (Chapter 22). "Love, the quality by which men attach each other" does not refer to a homosexual relationship (which Eleanor describes elsewhere as a "Greek passion"). She uses "love" here to describe male bonding, involving abiding friendship, mutual admiration and respect. The shift in meaning since the middle ages has led to many misconceptions.

Eleanor was an expert on Henry's failed relationships, including with her. Here, she expresses her resentment: "Granted Rosamond was three-and-thirty. I was forty-four, old enough that I no longer roused passion in the husband whose children I bore. To Henry, my body was as well rehearsed as a hasty mass before breakfast." (Ch. 22). During this period of intense frustration that led her to move from England to Poitiers, the altruistic model of platonic love between Radegonde and Fortunatus must have beckoned to her like a mirage across the Channel. Here was a demonstration of love and respect between two people on spiritual and secular levels.

Eleanor's Court of Ladies is sometimes called her Court of Love. To understand why, we have to set aside the modern meaning of love. At a time when romantic love had no place in the business transaction that was a noble marriage, romance and love became a game played in the realm of courtesy and politesse.

In Eleanor's Court of Ladies, courtly love was seen to refine whatever was vulgar. It might lift whatever was low. By emulating her grandfather, the "Troubadour" duke, Eleanor sought to build a lasting cult of love -- love as a game, as a jeu or a joi. Her grandfather's ideal in a man was one in whom cheer and charity co-mingled with wisdom and wit -- and a slight taste for war. Knights, he knew, might assail each other with blows till their brains rang like bells in the name of chivalry. For noble persons of Eleanor's generation, and her grandfather's, there was no higher calling than knighthood. But it took more than valor to be a "gentle-man," a style that was still taking shape during the Troubadour's reign.

He was long gone by the time Eleanor re-established her ducal court in his tower. Gone, but not forgotten. Eleanor had inherited her grandfather's titles, titles descended through ten generations of males. And those titles brought duties, one of which she set herself: to build a better ethos within her realms, Poitou and Aquitaine. And what better mortar than love to cement the parts in a civil society? Henry was developing the concept of male juries in England; Eleanor's female panels would rule on social affairs of the heart.

In the name of women, then, Eleanor claimed possession of amor. One can imagine her reasoning: Who better than women to judge matters of the heart and thereby weave a tapestry of better things? What a loss to European society when Henry in his rage destroyed her social conventions and shipped her back to England, into exile.

In the twelfth century culture of the troubadours, which Eleanor espoused and supported, pure love balanced on a sword's edge between constant desire and timeless chastity, between eternal longing and eternal disappointment. Radegonde's convent, six hundred years earlier, and Eleanor's twelfth century Court of Ladies, had this much in common: they embodied the social and spiritual means to give love's longing, l'attente amoureuse, expression and a peaceful voice.

How straightforward, yet how unattainable, the solution to loneliness and fear must have seemed to noble women of the twelfth century. They were raised behind heavy stone walls in a culture of warfare, traded as infants and abandoned for seasons on end. Eleanor's Court of Ladies may have addressed the question: How can the life of a woman's soul thrive in a barracks? Eleanor and her court of women were working out the answer by trying to live it during those shining days at Poitiers. But that is not the message that descends to us, interpreted as it was through generations of men, whether scribes, courtiers, kings or acolytes of a suspicious Church.

When she looked back at her life from old age, Eleanor surely considered her happiest years to have been her first, in Aquitaine, and later, when she presided over her Court of Ladies. Perhaps this short span in a very long life was also her most productive.

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Footer: *Author Robert Fripp gives Eleanor of Aquitaine her own voice in Power of a Woman. Memoirs of a turbulent life (biographical fiction, historical fiction). (eBook edition: ISBN 0-9780621-0-8. Print edition release in 2007: ISBN 0-9780621-4-0.) Robert's URL, http://RobertFripp.ca/, posts excerpts, reviews, a timeline with nearly 300 entries, and offers Power of a Woman for sale.