Updates

Plantagenet Princesses

Wednesday, 22 April 2020

'Plantagenet Princesses: The Daughters of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II' by Douglas Boyd was published by Pen & Sword in March 2020. This book is a great idea, so much so that it has already been written by Colette Bowie in 2014 (by the Belgian academic publishing house Brepols Publishers). Fortunately for Douglas Boyd nobody can afford the EUR 75 required to purchase this monograph from the publisher - and in any case it’s virtually invisible to the public. Bowie’s earlier (2011) Phd thesis is publicly available from the University of Glasgow at http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3177/ and what is interesting about this document is that the work was supervised by Professor Matthew Strickland, the author of the biography ’Henry, the Young King’ for Yale. Douglas Boyd is already one of the many biographers of Eleanor of Aquitaine (his was released in 2004) and in this new book he looks at some of the legacy of Henry and Eleanor and describes the lives of their daughters who are discussed only rarely in print. The publicity is unclear about whether or not the book includes a descprition of the lives of Eleanor’s two daughters by Louis VII, Marie and Alix. ISBN 9781526743107