Читать книгу Unveiling Lady Clare - Carol Townend, Carol Townend - Страница 6

Arthurian myths and legends have been popular for hundreds of years. Dashing knights worship beautiful ladies, fight for honour—and sometimes lose honour! Some of the earliest versions of these stories were written in the twelfth century by an influential poet called Chrétien de Troyes. Troyes was the walled city in the French county of Champagne, where Chrétien lived and worked. His patron, Countess Marie of Champagne, was a princess—daughter of King Louis of France, and the legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine. Countess Marie’s splendid artistic court in Troyes rivalled Queen Eleanor’s in Poitiers.

The books in my Knights of Champagne mini-series are not an attempt to rework the Arthurian myths and legends; they are original romances set around the Troyes court. I wanted to tell the stories of some of the lords and ladies who might have inspired Chrétien—and I was keen to give the women a more active role, since Chrétien’s ladies tend to be too passive for today’s reader.

Apart from a brief glimpse of Count Henry and Countess Marie, my characters are all fictional. I have used the layout of the medieval city to create my Troyes, but these books are first and foremost fictional.