Description: For too long many historians have avoided the careers of Medieval queens, dismissing them as creatures of romance and legend. A renewed interest in such women has been created by a new understanding of women and power in the Middle Ages. Eleanor of Castile looks at the wife of Edward I of England, a woman eulogized since the sixteenth century as a model of virtuous womanhood who overcame the impediment of her foreign birth to win all English hearts. John Carmi Parsons overturns this view and shows that Eleanor's contemporaries had a different opinion of their queen. Eleanor of Castile thus becomes a study in the construction of the imagery and society's perception of that imagery. Parsons also considers the evolution of the queen's posthumous legend as it was fashioned and refashioned in response to changing opinions on women and power.

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