1. This is the view of most recent historians. See Kathleen Casey, “The Cheshire Cat: Reconstructing the Experience of Medieval Woman,” in Liberating Women’s History, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 224–49;
2. Jo Ann McNamara and Suzanne F. Wemple, “Sanctity and Power: The Dual Pursuit of Medieval Women,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 90–118.
3. Gaston Richard, La Femme dans l’histoire (Paris: Octave Doin et Fils, 1909), p. 78.
4. See especially Amy Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950).
5. A short biography of Blanche of Castile is contained in Frances and Joseph Gies, Women in the Middle Ages (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1978), pp. 97–119.