Eleanor of Aquitaine

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John Parsons

Eleanor of Aquitaine

Legg inn av John Parsons » 20 feb 2005 12:00:02

The original intent of this discussion hais become increasingly obscured by
tangential disputes, despite the posting of the relevant passage from the
chronicle Andrew Lewis cites for the year of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s birth, &
the text of the note in which he puts the case for accepting that evidence
for the year of her birth.

Here I return to and try to clarify the parameters of the debate in the
hopes that this will help members find their way through thorny thickets
that are growing ever thicker and less relevant.

This was cut/pasted to email & some characters may not have come through as
originally typed. Because the localization of the chronicler Lewis
discusses is not absolutely certain, I’ve put “Limoges” in quotation marks.

(a) All 20th-century statements that Eleanor was born ca 1122 rest on Alfred
Richard’s Histoire des comtes de Poitou. Richard guessed that Eleanor was
about 82 when she died in 1204. He cited no source, nor has any been found
for her age at death. Most probably, Richard merely assumed she would have
been about 15 when she married Louis VII in 1137. No 20th/21st-century
historian who repeated Richard’s guesswork had anything more to support that
view than he had--in other words, they parrotted an assumption made eight
centuries after the fact. No amount of quibbling over the date, authorship,
or localization of the “Limoges” chronicle (see next paragraph) will alter
the fact that Richard’s statement is as baseless as the accounts of those
who repeated it. That it was “there first” makes it neither authoritative
nor a superior alternative to other evidence.

(b) The “Limoges” chronicle was, as Lewis says, compiled in the late
13th/early 14th century. The text contains material Lewis identifies from
the earlier work of Geoffroi de Vigeois and as he argues, it probably also
contains material from lost earlier works. Many medieval chronicles contain
material from earlier texts; one case is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which
incorporates material from earlier genealogical regnal lists and from a lost
record dubbed the “West Saxon Annals,” of which the earliest portions were
possibly put in writing as early as ca 550 and almost certainly from ca
650.[1] As with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, many medieval chronicles are of
unknown authorship, as are the places where they were written and, like the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, many were written well after the fact. To insist
that we must reject any chronicle if its authorship is unknown, because it
was written at an unknown location, or at a date later than the events it
relates, would be to deprive ourselves of so many sources of information
about the Middle Ages that our histories would have to be massively
rewritten.

(c) It would be astonishing to find a chronicle written in the late 13th or
early 14th century that was truly the earliest work to give Eleanor’s age at
marriage in 1137. It is impossible even to theorize what motives a
chronicler might have had for inventing such a detail at a time when the
import of Eleanor’s age in 1137 would have paled in comparison to her
dramatic later life. In any event we would have to ask ourselves how that
writer could have known enough about Eleanor to invent her age. Suppose he
searched chronicles to find out when she bore her last child and calculated
backward from that year. But if he found that she had a son as late as
1166, we might expect him to have made her younger in 1137 than he did. In
any case, it cannot be stated too strongly that a chronicler writing some
150 years later would not bother to invent such a detail. A far simpler
deduction is that the “Limoges” author took the statement from an earlier
source that is now lost. Lewis easily unravels the complications in this
passage as scribal errors that, as we all know, very commonly resulted as
earlier texts were copied.

(d) The “Limoges” text is accurate on the date and place of William X’s
death in 1137. After the lapse of some 150 years, such accuracy can be
explained only if the passage including Eleanor’s age was taken from an
earlier source.

(e) In discussing a hypothetical chronicle written by someone who would not
have been aware of Eleanor’s age in 1204, Lewis employs a tactic familiar to
historians: he sets up a straw man and knocks it down to show that the
suggested scenario is untenable–as I do above, suggesting and then refuting
that a medieval writer searched chronicles to find out when Eleanor had her
last child. This tactic signifies no lapse in logic; the scenario’s
hypothetical nature is acknowledged. But the “Limoges” text is not a straw
man; it exists & says something potentially valuable. We must engage with
it whether or not individual researchers ultimately accept it as accurate.

(f) Obviously the decision whether to accept or to reject Lewis’ arguments
is up to each of us individually. The main point to keep in mind is that
Alfred Richard had no evidence that Eleanor died at about eighty-two; the
“deduction” that she was born ca 1122, based on his statement, is as
groundless today as it was when he made it, no matter how many writers have
since repeated it. Despite the “Limoges” chronicle’s late compilation, its
anonymous authorship and uncertain localization, its testimony has claims to
credibility that Richard’s baseless guesswork conspicuously lacks.

[1] See G.O. Sayles, _The Medieval Foundations of England_ (rev. 2nd edn.,
Methuen 1964), pp. 7-8, and Barbara Yorke, _Kings and Kingdoms of Early
Anglo-Saxon England_ (Routledge, 1990), pp. 128-29.

Regards

John P.

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