Artigo Revisado por pares

Marie of France, Countess of Champagne, 1145–1198

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fh/crz055

ISSN

1477-4542

Autores

Tracy Adams,

Tópico(s)

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Resumo

Today, we associate the Countess Marie of Champagne first and foremost with her mother, twice queen and renowned literary patron, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The association is all the stronger because romancier Chrétien de Troyes frequented Marie’s court and even mentions her as the imaginative force behind the Knight of the Cart, in which Lancelot and Guinevere appear as lovers for the first time. In the work’s prologue, Chrétien acknowledges that the Countess of Champagne had supplied him with the story’s ‘sens’ (meaning) and ‘matière’ (content). Surely, mother and daughter must have enjoyed a close relationship? It seems that they did not: not a shred of evidence suggests that they ever met again after Eleanor, her marriage to Louis VII annulled, left France in 1152 to marry Henry Plantagenet, soon to be Henry II of England. Theodore Evergates’s biography, however, presents a Countess of Champagne who is an important figure in her own right, a competent ruler who served as regent for her husband, Henry the Liberal, when he set out on Crusade in May 1179, for her minor Henry II after her husband’s death and for the adult Henry II during his absences, first, on the Third Crusade and then in the Levant. Already the author of Henry the Liberal: Count of Champagne, 1127–1181 and The Aristocracy in the County of Champagne, 1100–1300 (2007), Evergates demonstrates how Marie maintained Count Henry’s consolidation of Champagne’s patchwork of lordships into a significant principality.

Referência(s)
Altmetric
PlumX