📗 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 and queenly excellence who overcame the impediment of her foreign birth to win all English hearts. By exploring Eleanor's behavior and the ways in which it was interpreted by her subjects, John Carmi Parsons overturns this view and shows that Eleanor's contemporaries actually had quite a different opinion of their queen.