Sex With the Queen - Eleanor Herman

Sex With the Queen
Eleanor Herman
c. 2006
322 pages

Still with the history. Don't make fun. I picked this book up a Barnes and Nobles just as something to skim for a bit while waiting for Cynthia to finish browsing and ended up buying it instead. I had seen Elenor Herman’s first book on this sort of subject, Sex With Kings, and had thought of skimming it before, though never had actually picked it up. Now I’m not so sure I actually will.

Not to say that this was an uninteresting book. Basically it’s just a book thorugh history about Queens and sex, whether with their husbands or with secret lovers. Some of the accounts were of people I’d never heard of, generally in countries such as parts of Scandanavia or Eastern Europe. There was a lot of fairly inside information. And a lot was incredibly interesting, delving this far into the personal lives of these figures. My main complaint with the book is this: A lot of the accounts were somewhat similar and so there were times I could easily get bored. Princess has to marry someone super unfortunate, she falls in love with a new hot guy, they start getting down and dirty, and so he’s eventually either murdered or executed. One somewhat selfish issue I found by the end of this book was I was tired of deciding I liked someone only to have them killed. Though this is a problem one will always find when reading anything, especially history.

And one last thing, I find it is interesting to note that there are many accounts throughout history of kings being homosexual. And not just the creepy ones, something I think is often portrayed. For instance, someone as manly as King Richard the Lionheart of England was supposedly doing King Phillip the Fair of France back before the Crusades. And I believe the book Sex With Kings is peppered with these homosexual accounts. However, in Sex With the Queen, there is only one report of any royal lesbian action. This is not really a complaint, for who can complain because a history books lacks mention of something that didn’t happen, just something interesting I observed.

4/5