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Dominating her own twelfth century, famous for her beauty and generosity, Eleanor of Aquitaine was queen to Louis VII of France and then Henry II of England. Worshipped by troubadours, she had an uneasy relationship with her husbands, scheming against King Henry, who then kept her in prison for fifteen years. Emerging at his death to become regent for her son Richard I, she ordered the release of prisoners throughout England, announcing, 'From my own experience, prisons are hateful to men and being released from them is a most delightful refreshment to the spirit.' She also patronized the great abbey of nuns at Fontevrault, as a refuge for battered wives of brutal. Today her glamour, her patronage of the poets and her throwing off the constraints which shackled the women of her day are almost forgotten, as are her gifts as politician and ruler. This book reconciles the paradoxes in the formidable personality of 'a monstrous injurer of heaven and earth', who was loved and admired by so many.

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9781909869165

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Desmond Seward is best known for three books: The Monks of War (1972), The Wars of the Roses (1995), and A Brief History of the Hundred Years War. He is one of a small group of historical writers who see narrative as an essential part of the historical process, looking back to Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The periods that interest him most are England in the Middle Ages, especially the fifteenth century, and France from the Hundred Years War until the late nineteenth.

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