Sometimes, when people write about the past they are in actuality projecting their personal experiences and views of the world to those times. We are doing that here, obviously. A lot. Perhaps so did Thomas Hearne and other Victorians who assumed Rosamund must have been a girlish, wilting flower of a woman, since those were virtues that men seemed to cherish during their own time. This notion that Rosamund was sweet and timid and Eleanor was domineering and unlovable comes up a lot in Victorian English writings. But look, that’s not necessarily the way it was. First of all, the assumption that
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