Eleanor of Aquitaine Quotes

“Bernart de Ventadorn.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“queenly heads on churches of this period in the area – at Langon’s Notre-Dame du Bourg, heads from the south wall of the choir are frequently said to represent portraits of Eleanor and Henry. But others exist at Saint-Andre in Bordeaux and in Notre-Dame de Saintes, where Eleanor’s aunt was abbess.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“Thus the evidence points more toward a life heavy on education and religion than one mired in frivolity and fashion.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“The second is the report that one thing which Eleanor did do on her arrival in Paris was dismiss the choirmaster of the royal chapel of St Nicholas, replacing him with her own nominee.34”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“in other words that she brought not troubadour music but cutting-edge religious music to Paris. There”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“Eleanor’s new city was, therefore, alive with interest, even if it was still far from being a place of beauty.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“Nor should it be forgotten that Paris had been besieged and threatened repeatedly by the Vikings and saved only by substantial bribes.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“Instead, a teenaged royal couple were acceding to the throne away from the centre of power, and indeed in territory which might well be regarded as hostile.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“He knew, from the Church’s teaching, that anything more than a dutiful approach to paying the marriage debt was a sin; lust would corrupt his understanding, and to actually enjoy sex was to glory in a sin. Marriage, and sex within marriage, should be regarded as a distasteful necessity directed only at the procreation of children. It must be eschewed on Wednesdays, Fridays, weekends and feast days. Following St Jerome, loving one’s wife with too much passion was seen as the sin of adultery; sex must be performed with restraint, and it was the responsibility of the husband to hold back”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“Marriage, and sex within marriage, should be regarded as a distasteful necessity directed only at the procreation of children. It must be eschewed on Wednesdays, Fridays, weekends and feast days. Following St Jerome, loving one’s wife with too much passion was seen as the sin of adultery; sex must be performed with restraint, and it was the responsibility of the husband to hold back and to repress the excessive passions of the wife.17 Such”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“and they had brought about a situation where Aquitaine, although nominally under the power of France, partook very considerably of its closer neighbour’s culture.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“For these Islamic invaders were patrons of learning who transformed the part of the peninsula they inhabited, ushering in advanced agriculture, huge sophisticated towns, and seventeen universities (by way of comparison, there were two universities elsewhere in Europe). Their main towns, such as Toledo, became centres of excellence for medicine, architecture, agronomy, astrology and mathematics.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“She will also have been familiar with Limoges and the famous Abbey of Saint-Martial, which was probably the major centre for church music within France at the time. Aquitaine, and in particular the Abbey of Saint-Martial, was at the cutting edge of polyphonic religious music, with the scriptorium at Saint Martial apparently operating as a valuable repository for polyphonic works as they developed.29”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“After all, Philippa of Toulouse had been ousted by an uncle of very dubious legitimacy; and as noted earlier, the position as regard women’s rights was moving backwards rather than forwards as the twelfth century progressed.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“the marriage of William’s widowed sister Agnes to Raimon, King of Aragon, giving tacit papal acknowledgement of Aquitaine’s position as a quasi-royal territory.12”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires

“He does seem to have inherited his father’s taste for troubadour verse – he is reliably recorded as a patron of two of the foremost poets of the day, Cercamon and Marcabru, though the picturesque reports of a Welsh bard, Bleddri, appear to derive from later sources. He was also a considerable patron of other entertainers, which suggests that his court was lively and musical.”
― Sara Cockerill, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France and England, Mother of Empires