Many of the more salacious rumors about Eleanor of Aquitaine by twelfth- and thirteenth-century chroniclers were followed by the qualified “as it was said” (ut dicetur). This established what today we would call “plausible deniability” by using the passive voice. In Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said, Karen Sullivan has taken that expression and run with it, creating this fascinating and comprehensive study of the medieval queen of England and France's reputation, from contemporary chronicles to the 1960s play and film The Lion in Winter.

The book is divided into six long thematic chapters, addressing Eleanor's roles in history, literature, and legend as heiress, crusader, “The Courtly Lady,” queen mother, “The Old Woman of Fontevraud,” and “The Lioness in Winter.” Sullivan uses a wide range of sources; chronicles, literature, and legend are all employed to throw light upon Eleanor and her image in different times and contexts. An example of how the author interweaves these sources can be seen in chapter 1, “The Heiress,” in which Sullivan goes from discussing the circumstances of Eleanor's engagement and marriage to Louis VII as revealed in the chronicles, to the “demon wife” motif in legend, which found its way into the thirteenth-century rhymed chronicle of Philippe Mouskés, illustrating how the divide between “history” and “legend” can be a thin one.

The book's strengths lie in the author's impressive scholarship. Sullivan is equally at home discussing medieval chronicles, troubadour literature, and modern movies. Among these strengths is her incisive analysis of the language used by medieval chroniclers to describe Eleanor and her actions, showing how they would change sentence structure and voice to indicate the extent (in their opinion) of her agency. The chroniclers may tell us little in the way of facts about Eleanor, but, argues Sullivan, “they suggest interpretation of those facts … implicitly, through the language they employ in reporting her deeds. The structure of a sentence, the diction of a phrase, or the nature of a simile can give us a greater understanding of the moral context within which Eleanor was operating than has been recognized heretofore” (9). The turn in recent decades to archival evidence, such as Marie Hivergneaux's work on Eleanor's charters, has done much to flesh out the meager bones of the chroniclers’ accounts of Eleanor. However, I think Sullivan is right, in the context of a study of Eleanor's reputation, to turn back to the chronicles and analyze them not just for what they say, but how they say it.

Equally incisive is Sullivan's discussion of The Lion in Winter. James Goldman's 1966 play, and the 1968 movie adaption even more so, has shaped much of the public perception of Eleanor. The author discusses Katharine Hepburn's performance as the queen, the parallels between Eleanor and Hepburn, and the extent to which Hepburn “becomes” Eleanor (and vice versa) in the film. However, Sullivan goes beyond the obvious focus on the film's leading lady to approach the movie through the character of Alais (Alys), the French princess intended for Eleanor's son Richard, but seduced instead by her husband Henry II. The author addresses how the role of this relatively minor character in the film reveals the dynamics of female power (or lack of it), while also referring back to what little the medieval chroniclers tell us about Alys.

There is a danger that such a wide-ranging study, based on such a broad range of sources, can lose coherence, and there are times when this is the case in Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said. I found myself wondering how some of Sullivan's case studies, no matter how interesting and perceptive her treatment of them may be, fit into the work as a whole. I was left unsure what the purpose of the book is: a history of Eleanor (to be fair, Sullivan tells us she is not writing a biography)? A study of her reputation? A collection of essays?

In addition, the author does sometimes err toward speculation, which has been the bane of Eleanor studies. In her study of Eleanor as “The Courtly Lady,” Sullivan addresses the controversial issue of Eleanor's role as a patron of troubadours, and the historicity (or lack of it) of the “Courts of Love” over which Andreas Capellanus claimed Eleanor presided. Sullivan seeks to take a middle ground between the “maximalists” who take this at face value and the “minimalist” camp, in which I confess I firmly belong. She avoids the extreme maximalism of, for example, Amy Kelly, who took Andreas literally, and proposed that courts of love really did meet at the court of Eleanor's daughter Marie de Champagne. Sullivan more cautiously suggests that we take the literary sources more seriously than the “minimalists” have, and there is merit to this argument. However, there are rather too many conditional structures in her language for my liking: “If we can accept the love affair between Eleanor and Bernart [de Ventadorn], not as something that did or did not occur, but something that may have occurred …” (91) and again, “If we can accept Eleanor's involvement in discussions of love, not as something that did or did not occur, but as something that may have occurred …” (100). Nevertheless, the debate about Eleanor as a patron and the courts of love is worth revisiting, and Sullivan provides us with plenty of food for thought.

These are, however, minor criticisms. Overall, the work is a challenging (in the best sense of the word) and perceptive examination of Eleanor's life in history, rumor, and legend. The breadth of Sullivan's scholarship makes this a book that will be of interest both to historians and to literary scholars (not to mention folklorists and students of popular culture). It is a welcome addition to the literature on a medieval queen who continues to fascinate.