Women In The Middle Ages: Eleanor Of Aquitaine

961 Words2 Pages

The Middle Ages were not a fair time period, with power being distributed via the feudal system amongst nobles. Consequently, many groups did not benefit from this type of leadership. One of these groups were the women at the time. Although nowadays women have as much right as anybody in most places due to gender equality laws, it was very different back then. Thought of as nothing more than the property of their fathers or husbands, they were often neglected and ignored by most of society for their supposed stupidity. Even noble women did not have much power, having to rely on their spouses for it. Despite such restrictions, there were still some that were able to show through the veil of darkness. One such individual was Eleanor of Aquitaine, …show more content…

As a child and princess in Aquitaine, she had the best of the best, eagerly drinking in and listening to countless stories woven by troubadours. One of her favorites was that of love, where her grandfather had escaped with her grandmother and married for love. This story of love would later affect her ideals. And it did. During her entire life, Eleanor constantly strove to spread the idea of love, not of political marriages. She encouraged it through many ways, from creating the Courts of Love, a court in which lovers asked questions to noble ladies and received their advice, to divorcing somebody herself and remarrying because of the emotion. Other things created because of her love ideals included a book on how to make love and treat lovers - a lover’s guide essentially - and many new poems and stories that focused on women rather than men, elevating their position even if it was not so in real life. With her exquisite views, she was able to introduce a new form of marriage: that based on love (“It was unlikely that pure, true love could exist in marriage...” - page 110, Brooks: Queen Eleanor). These new propositions brought a great advanced change to the world - new opportunities, giving the just settling people a great push forward to a new civilized

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