I’ve always had a special affinity for historical fiction, more specifically, historical fiction about the English courts of medieval times. As someone who has never excelled in the complex maneuverings of office politics, I find the level of intrigue and skulduggery that existed then alternately fascinating and mind boggling. The stakes were pretty high; if you found yourself on the wrong side of history, you could end up imprisoned in the tower of London, or worse still, with your head dangling on a pike for all to see.
Until I signed on to review The King’s Mistress for the virtual book tour, I was unaware that Alice Perrers is one of the most despised villains in British history. Perrers has been reviled by her peers and scholars alike—characterized as a woman who used her beauty, sensuality, and cunning to take advantage of an aging king for her own material and political gain. Described as the world’s leading authority on Alice Perrers, Compton has set about revealing the truth of the matter with a fascinating text that both rehabilitates and humanizes her.
It’s no secret that the combination of intelligence, erotic allure, and beauty is a dangerous mix for women, and throughout history these women have both fascinated and repelled us as far back as Eve. Because this novel falls in the genre of historical fiction, Campion admits in her author’s notes to taking some liberties with the facts to breathe new life into Perrer’s story, but much of this voluminous novel comes from her extensive research on Perrer’s life and times.
When we first meet Alice, she is fourteen, and her beauty is already in full bloom. Her mother, an aging and discontented beauty, seems to view Alice as competition, yet resents her father’s decision to betroth Alice to a charismatic, wealthy merchant twenty years her senior. Alice fears leaving the comfort and safety of her family, but is excited to embark on this new chapter in her life. What she doesn’t realize is that her husband is withholding secrets that she will only discover once she is enmeshed in her own web of intrigue.
Suffice it to say, Compton’s sympathetic rendering of Perrer’s story presents her as a woman who finds herself in circumstances beyond her control, and forced to use her attributes to survive in a world where a person who appears to be your ally one day could turn out to be your enemy the next. Emma Campion has reimagined history into “herstory” in this beautifully written, riveting novel.
Alison Weir is first a historian, and it shows in Captive Queen. She studied Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1970s and 1990s and realized one day that “the nature of medieval biography, particularly of women, is the piecing together of fragments of information and making sense of them. It can be a frustrating task, as there are often gaps that you know you can never fill.”
Captive Queen explores Eleanor’s life from just before her marriage to Henry FitzEmpress (later Henry II, King of England) until just after Henry’s death in 1189. There is also an epilogue that covers her death in 1204. At the beginning, there’s a map of lower England and Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany, and France, which are all parts of present-day France. Also included is a helpful flowchart of Eleanor and Henry’s genealogy, which I referred to numerous times when I was trying to remember minor characters.
The novel itself is split into five parts, each representing a stage in Eleanor’s life and marriage to Henry. The first part is a rosy depiction of Eleanor’s early life with Henry. At the time of their wedding, he was eighteen and she was twenty-nine and already had two daughters. They were married just two months after the annulment of her marriage to the King of France, Louis VII. Eleanor’s marriage to King Henry was tumultuous: she fought with Henry often about his rule of her lands. At the same time, however, it was steamy; it wasn’t even twenty pages in before the first bedroom scene occurs. Still, it’s clear she wanted a partnership of equals, not a man to rule over her as husband and lord, which was the norm at the time, especially for women in royalty.
The following four parts accentuate her desire to be included in affairs of state, rule her lands equitably, and be treated as more than “the wife of King Henry and mother of his children.” The second part covers her apparent rivalry with Thomas Becket. In the third part, Weir writes about Eleanor and Henry’s sons: Young Henry, Richard (who would become Richard the Lionheart), Geoffrey, and John (later to become King John, best known for signing the Magna Carta and for being a primary antagonist in most Robin Hood legends).
After encouraging her sons to rebel (unsuccessfully) against their father, Henry placed Eleanor under house arrest for more than fifteen years, most notably in Sarum, Wiltshire (the earliest settlement of present-day Salisbury, England). There, she received very little news from outside the confines of her imprisonment but was finally freed upon Henry’s death in 1189. In the novel, she says to her gaoler, “Master Berneval, I command you, in the name of King Richard, to set me at liberty at once.” And he does.
Two things irked me about Captive Queen, and neither are the author’s fault. The first is Henry’s repeated insistence (and everyone else’s assumption) that women are meant to be child-bearers and nothing more. Eleanor herself even notes that she is most proud of her daughters when they produce children—hopefully sons—for their husbands. The second is that Eleanor’s life revolves around the men in it, no matter how much she wants to rule her lands herself or how intelligent and magnanimous she is in acting as Henry’s regent. The first thing is the unfortunate sexist reality Eleanor had to deal with during her lifetime. The second is related; Weir’s frustration at being able to find only a very few fragments of Eleanor’s life basically forced her to study the men surrounding Eleanor and often make conjectures about her based on what was written about them.
It’s clear in reading that Alison Weir did a lot of research before penning Captive Queen as a fiction. After all, she writes, “What is the point of a historical novel... based on a real person if the author does not take pains to make it authentic as possible?” For fans of medieval Europe, this book is a must read. Just beware that the author made it as authentic as possible, right down to the sexism of the time period.
One reason I gravitate towards historical fiction is that I enjoy discovering individuals in history whom I normally wouldn’t learn about on my own. Eleanor Glanville was a seventeenth century English entomologist from Somerset. Her specialty was butterflies and some of her collections still live in the Natural History Museum today. Though Glanville’s work is several centuries old, Fiona Mountain brings Glanville’s contributions and character to life in Lady of the Butterflies.
As a child, Glanville grew up under the strict guidance of her Puritan father who forbade her to participate in Christmas or other Catholic celebrations. At the same time, this father also encouraged her to embrace and understand her environment at Tickenham Court, which was located in the middle of a moor. Eleanor’s passionate interest in insects, specifically butterflies, started at a young age but was seen as abnormal behavior among her neighbors and servants. In the late seventeenth century, education for women was not encouraged or looked upon kindly.
In her early twenties, Eleanor married Edmund Ashfield whom she loved dearly, and bore him two children. However, she had a rather unhealthy desire and longing for his closest friend, Richard Glanville, who was a dashing but extremely moody young man. There are sections of the book that are reminiscent of a romance novel, especially in the descriptions of Eleanor and Richard’s interactions. Fiona Mountain wants the reader to know that this was a fiercely passionate woman whether it be toward the men she loved, her butterflies, or her children.
What I found the most interesting about Glanville was her love of nature and learning and her ability to win the respect and admiration of male scientists, young and old. Many naturalists of that time were interested in her quest to understand the metamorphism of the butterfly and were quick to support her discoveries.
While reading this book, there was always a touch of apprehension. Glanville was sometimes on the edge of danger because many of her neighbors, servants, and acquaintances accused her of being insane. After all, what self-respecting woman would run chasing butterflies with her hair down when she had responsibilities at home? This was also during the period of the witch hunts, in which a woman caught interacting with nature might likely be accused of cavorting with the devil.
Lady of the Butterflies was an illuminating read about a fascinating woman. The Glanville Fritillary butterfly was named after Glanville, and I must admit that I have developed a renewed interest in those painted winged beauties.
Being the rabid Ridley Scott fan that I am, last week I went to go see his new movie, Robin Hood, at the theatre. (Being the cheapskate that I am, I went in the morning and paid four dollars less than going at night, because really, ten dollars to see a movie is ridiculous.)
Robin Hood isn't Kingdom of Heaven, let's start with that. I know a lot of reviewers, myself included, went in thinking it would be much of the same material, and it wasn't... to a point. Robin Hood takes place about nine years after the events in Kingdom of Heaven, close to the end of Richard's wars in France, which come to an unforeseen halt when Richard dies. The main character, Robin Longstride, is an average man in the ranks of Richard's army, pulled to the king's attention when Richard, on a whim, goes through the camp looking for "an honest man." Scott set out to retell Robin Hood, and in that he succeeded. And while he was doing it, he took a lot of the fun out of the Robin Hood story and inserted a lot of politics.
I think the big draw of Robin Hood is that he's a man who exists outside of political interests, or if he is involved, his intentions are always very clear: he's King Richard's man, he supports Richard's causes, and he supports the people. Simple and easy to remember. Scott's Hood should be simple, but instead comes off as much more complicated and politically embroiled than a character who, up until a half hour into the movie, was just a common archer. He expresses himself much better than a common man would have. That's kind of a theme in Scott's movies, which Balian somehow got away with, but Robin's high-handed speeches just sound dull.
What's interesting about this movie is the extremely mixed response it got throughout the reviewing world. Most people disliked it, and I can see why. Two sources that liked it a little more than the rest, however, interested me. One major feminist blog reviewed it with evident enthusiasm, the writer reporting that she loved the strong female lead offered by Cate Blanchett (appropriate sentiments for a feminist blog) and the revolutionary aspects of the idea that you didn't have to be a noble to speak up an affect change in a society.
The other interesting review is from the National Catholic Register, which is the only weekly paper my house now receives. Their film critic, Steven Greydanus, said it was "more watchable in most respects" than Kingdom of Heaven (a statement I'd like to vehemently disagree with) and judged that "the moral issues [were] less muddled, the hero more compelling, the heroine more relevant, and the romance at least relatable, if not especially engaging."
As much as I love Blanchett and the idea of a feminist Marian, that was one of the elements in the movie that didn't sit well with me. Both critics bring it up as something to be praised in Scott's epic, and I'm going to have to disagree. Kingdom of Heaven had a strong female lead in Princess Sybilla, a woman who was interesting because she was hard to understand at times and remarkably transparent in others. Sybilla made sense in the context of her story; for part of her life she had been a political pawn and needed to continue being a political pawn (something that went against her personality) if she wanted to see her kingdom survive.
Marion, on the other hand, makes less sense. Even if her husband had been gone with Richard for ten years, the idea that she would have become this Amazonian leadership lady in that time didn't seem possible in England circa 1200. Is she more relatable? Yes, more people could probably relate to Marion than they could to Sybilla. That doesn't necessarily mean she belonged in the story. A woman taking up a sword at the end of the film? It doesn't even begin to make sense. The feminist element in Robin Hood contributes just as much to the revisionist view of history that Greydanus (rightfully) accuses Scott of as any of the other wildly inaccurate historical elements in the film.
As I tried to figure out how to write this review, I attempted to find some lesson I could take away from the different ways these different people reviewed this film. Anna watched it as a feminist and found something she liked. Steven watched it as a Catholic and found it lacking. As for myself, watching the film as both a Catholic and a feminist (as well as a lot of other things), I found my lens as an amateur historian taking more and more of my attention away from the others.
I won't claim that I took note of all the inaccuracies in Robin Hood, and I'll certainly admit to ignoring some of the revisionist elements in Kingdom of Heaven. Both movies inspired me to do more research on the period in question. I have four books from the library on William Marshall and a growing collection of literature on what life was like in Europe and the Latin East in the 1100s. To me, the idea that a piece of media can be a gateway into a wider world of fact checking and research is a valuable one, and one that is helping me find the joyful Middle Ages behind Hollywood's "faux-realist medieval world," the real links of mutual respect between the Muslim world and the Christian one, and the real proto-feminist figures in the medieval history (women like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Hildegarden of Bingen, and Queen Melisande of Jerusalem).
Overall, I'd recommend avoiding the admission price (however low) at the theater and waiting for the DVD if you were thinking of going to see Robin Hood. In the meantime, you're welcome to join me in reading Warriors of God by James Reston and Four Queens by Nancy Goldstone for a more historically accurate look at the the Crusades and women in the middle ages.
And if you must have your ridiculous but fantastic crusades, there's always the other Scott named Walter.
By Emma Campion
