Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said

Book excerpt: Further, we possess a dozen other accounts ("parahistories," as Sullivan calls them)-love songs, ballads, romances, anecdotes, treatises, and epistles from the period-all of which purport to tell us something of this queen. Fantastical as so many of the medieval tales about Eleanor may seem, for Sullivan, they tell us certain truths about what was possible for a woman in twelfth-century France, certain expectations buried in the fantasies, and those truths, as much as can be known at our great remove, are the subject of this book. Sullivan offers a new method to read, not through the historical records, as earlier scholars have done, but in them.