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I'm currently reading "Queens of the Crusades" by Allison Weir, about the lives of England's Medieval queens, starting from Eleanor of Aquitaine. From the book,
by valarauko 3y ago
I'm currently reading "Queens of the Crusades" by Allison Weir, about the lives of England's Medieval queens, starting from Eleanor of Aquitaine. From the book, the model I have to understand the context of French culture in Medieval England is to think of it as yet another principality within the much larger French cultural umbrella of continental Europe. Eleanor spoke not "French", but Lengadòc or Occitan. She learned Norman French later in life. Her daughter-in-law, Berengaria of Navarre, spoke Castilian like her Castilian mother, and the rest of the Navarrese nobility, along with some Occitan. Later queens came from from the duchy of Provence. Through marriage, they were also duchesses of Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine, Gascony - regions that, like England, had cultural and linguistic similarities with the Kingdom of France, but their own independent political history. Some were held nominally as vassals of the French court, some not.
- noneeeed 3y agoThat sounds interesting, I think I need to put that on my reading list. It's hard for people now to think about history outside of the context of the relatively ordered national boarders that exist today. Most of the modern countries of Europe didn't exist in the medievil period, and many are less than a couple of hundred years old. I think it would surprise a lot of people if you told them that "Italy" as a country, is younger than the USA, or that "Spain" was a pretty young country when Columbus sailed the Atlantic. And as you say, even ones like France, that had a "top king" so to speak, were really loose associations of dukedoms and minor kingdoms.
- gerikson 3y agoI can recommend “Vanished Kingdoms” on the subject of pre-modern Europe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanished_Kingdoms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanished_Kingdoms