Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204)
Filed under the name Eleanor · April 15, 2026
I'll say up front, Eleanor of Aquitaine's story is about as far from my own life as a story could possibly get — Queen of France, then England, one of the most powerful women of the entire Middle Ages, patronizing troubadour poetry and courtly culture while most people in her era, women especially, had no power over their own lives at all. That's a level of privilege I have zero personal reference for, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise or dress it up as some universal working-woman story, because it isn't one. What actually earns her my respect, reading between the lines, is that she used the position skillfully and for a genuinely long stretch of time, across two different kingdoms, in an era when powerful women got pushed aside the second a man decided they were inconvenient. Surviving and staying influential that long, in that world, took real political sharpness, whatever else was handed to her by birth. I don't relate to the crown part. I relate a little to the part where a woman had to be smarter than everyone around her just to stay standing.