Eleanor of Aquitaine - Alison Weir

Advantages: Engaging style, good history, original sources quoted.
Disadvantages: A tendency to be revisionist just for the hell of it.

...iconic Queen With Two Crowns, Eleanor of Aquitaine, began about halfway into my A-Level studies in Medieval History, at which point the Angevin Empire became the central unit around which much of our work revolved. This 'Empire', as it is now termed, was never recognised as such during the reign of Henry II, at which time its power was at its zenith, but it was an extremely powerful force in the Western world during the twelfth and early thirteenth ...
...Queen, Eleanor. Eleanor has long been disparaged by historians as a 'whore', a 'very evil woman' and even as the fulfilment of one of Merlin's prophecies - 'the eagle of the broken bonds shall rejoice in her third nesting', the 'third nesting' here being usually conveniently taken to mean her third *son*, the dashing Richard the Lionheart. Throughout the middle ages, ballads of Eleanor's misdemeanours were already beginning to circulate, so that ... Read review

Advantages: Intelligent, accessible writing, great storytelling.
Disadvantages: Hmmm @ Thomas More.

...Prince of Wales and Duke of York has never, in the public imagination at least, been satisfactorily solved. Did the boys' uncle, Richard III really "do them in"? Or should we look elsewhere, to Henry VII perhaps, or perhaps even further afield? These are the questions Alison Weir hopes to answer in her book, The Princes in the Tower. Alison Weir writes "straight history". Although her subjects are usually the famous, romantic figures from history – Henry VIII, Eleanor of Aquitaine and here, Richard III – hers is not the sensationalist style of other current best-selling historians. She is not a Simon Schama or a David Starkey. Neither does she attempt a political or philosophical analysis of her subjects. You will not find Hobsbawm-style Marxist theory here. Rather, you will find a straightforward examination of the available sources... Read review

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