Eleanor of Aquitaine

About the Book

Eleanor of Aquitaine was a queen of France and later a queen of England. That alone should pique your interest in this woman. How can that be? Did she simply toss off her French crown, hop across the Channel, grab an English crown, and establish herself on a throne? Well, of course not. But how, then, did she pull off this trick? Eleanor also went on a crusade to the Holy Land. Moreover, she traveled to Germany, to Sicily, to central Spain, all around France, up and down England. In between, she had ten children. These children, born in the twelfth century, spread out around Europe, had children of their own, and what do you know! By the early sixteenth century, four hundred years after Eleanor’s birth, her direct descendants included Henry VIII King of England, Francis I King of France, Charles I King of Spain, and Maximilian I Holy Roman Emperor. What’s more, their wives were also in the Eleanor family—all direct descendants. How about that?

About the Author

The most important thing to know about John Gurley is that he is ninety-six years old going on one hundred. He has been retired from his position of professor of economics at Stanford University for twenty-eight years, long enough to learn hundreds of new things. He has written four brief books about caring for his wife, Yvette, during her stay in a dementia unit in Palo Alto, California, books that were published by AuthorHouse in the last few years and which have received twenty-four five-star reviews. Prior to his twenty-eight years at Stanford, Gurley taught economics at Princeton University and did research with his wife, who is also an economist, at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. John and Yvette, along with Professor Edward Shaw, completed a major work in 1960, with the publication of Money in a Theory of Finance. Since his retirement in 1987, John Gurley has studied early French and English histories as backgrounds to his later work on Eleanor of Aquitaine. He is presently living alone—since the death of his wife in December 2014—in a large retirement community located in Palo Alto, on the edge of Stanford University’s huge landholdings.