Women of Mediæval France Woman: in all ages and in all countries Vol. 5 (of 10)

In the older conception, history was a record chiefly of battles, of intrigues, of wicked deeds; it was true that the evil that men did lived after them; at least, the even teno...

BESIDE such a figure as that of Blanche de Castille, the women of whom we might next speak would seem pale ghosts, mere masks and shadows; and, even then, not always pleasing on...

GUILHELM--or William--X., Duke of Aquitaine, remorseful because of the ravages committed in Normandy by himself and his allies in 1136, started on an expiatory pilgrimage to the...

In Père Lachaise, the famous cemetery of Paris, there is none among the hundreds of monuments upon which the traveller looks with more interest than that of the lovely and unhap...

As the regency of Queen Blanche had begun without formality, so it ceased insensibly. There was no set day upon which she formally relinquished the reins to Louis; and so one ca...

WHILE the army of Jeanne d'Arc, starting with but four or five thousand men and gathering numbers from every side as it goes, is marching toward Orléans, let us look at the mili...

THAT France which had known queens good and bad, from Constance in the tenth to Blanche of Castille in the thirteenth century, was delivered over, toward the close of the fourte...

IN a preceding chapter we saw how old Queen Eleanor was despatched into Spain to bring her granddaughter, Blanche de Castille, as a bride for Louis of France, and how Eleanor fe...

HISTORIANS, having a predilection for exactness, are concerned to find dates not only for kings and queens and battles and treaties, but for those great changes in the manners a...

_C'est la moins folle femme du monde, car, de femme sage il n'y en a point_ (she is the least foolish woman in the world; there are no wise ones). The cynical old king, Louis XI...

WE are now coming to a period in the history of France when woman, though she may not play a part either more prominent or more honorable, will be a centre of universal interest...

_Cettelle ne vient pas de la terre; elle est envoyée du ciel._ Thus it is that a contemporary, a great politician and satirist, Alain Chartier, expresses his convictions regardi...

WHILE romance has preserved many memories, and history not a few facts, of Eleanor of Guienne, the records concerning two other notable women, her contemporaries, are very scant...

"SEULETE suy et seulete veuil estre, Seulete m'a mon doulz ami laissiée, Seulete suy sans compagnon ne maistre, Seulete suy dolente et courrouciée, Seulete suy en langueur mesai...

IT is the customary privilege of the author to meet you at the threshold, as it were, bid you welcome, and in his own person explain more fully and freely than he may elsewhere...