Talk:Agnes of Aquitaine, Queen of León and Castile

My recent edits
I thought I would explain some of my recent edits, just to be clear. As to moving the page, her husband's page calls him king of L & C, and when she married him, he was solely king of Leon, and she was Queen of Leon longer than any other territory. Likewise, Castile had yet to claim its role as dominant kingdom in the pair (that really didn't happen until the reigns of Alfonso VIII and Ferdinand III). Thus, to leave Leon out of her title is problematic. The birthdate for Agnes: we just have no way of knowing. She could have been born during any time that her parents were married, and the guesses cover most of the 1050s. Even Medieval Lands didn't have the date given here. Thus a precise date is hard to defend. As to her death, well, there are three different theories that I tried to relate, and while a 1078/9 death is coming to predominate, it has yet to reach consensus. So much for the dates. Segarding her burial, some poorly referenced statement that she was buried in the royal pantheon needed amplification - the tomb markers no longer exist, and while supposed transcripts have been published, these include two for Queen Isabel that give contradictory information, and others that appear to be factually incorrect in a manner that suggests they were not contemporary. Thus, the claim of burial (on the rather unscholarly Find a Grave site) needed tempering.

With regard to the distant relatives, this, I guess, is in part personal preference, but a look at Encyclopedias will not show you genealogies in text format. Unless there is some particular reason to note it, you learn little about a person by detailing who her paternal grandmother's father might have been, unless there is some particular reason to note it - some special connection between the two, such as an inheritance, but none of that applies here, nor does it to the link to the Queen of England three generations removed. Medieval people were related to other medieval people. If we were to indicate every relationship, again we would clutter the articles with details not relevant to understanding the people, and this would involve original research and personal judgements regarding which relationships are most relevant (for example, why is being related to Eleanor of Aquitaine more relevant than being niece of Empress Agnes?). Does either tells us anything about Agnes? Well, the relationship to the Empress might - it may indicate Alfonso's political reasoning in the marriage, linking himself to both the Duke of Aquitaine and to Henry IV (although to say so would again represent original research on my part, unless Reilly said the same.) I would bet a lot of money that neither Louis nor Henry married Eleanor because she was niece of Agnes of Leon and Castile.

The statement that she didn't exist was from a non-English, non-Iberian author who, simply put, didn't know what he was talking about. While I have not seen the work, it flies in the face of the contemporary record, and either represents a case of confusion between first wife and first mistress, or an author who was being too ingenius for his own good. Either way, no scholar familiar with the case has given this suggestion the slightest mention, and thus its includion gives it undue weight. Agricolae (talk) 00:51, 2 June 2009 (UTC)