Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress to the most culturally vibrant duchy in France, married Louis VII of France in 1137 at the age of around fifteen, becoming Queen of France. Eleanor's court in Aquitaine had been a nursery of troubadour poetry, and she brought this sensibility north to Paris, acting as patron to poets and musicians. Her subsequent marriage in 1152 to Henry II of England transferred this influence to the Angevin court, making her one of the most consequential patrons of courtly literature in the medieval world. Her daughters by Louis patronised the early development of Arthurian romance in northern France.

Eleanor's patronage was central to the flowering of troubadour lyric and the emergence of courtly love as a literary mode. Poets including Bernard de Ventadorn addressed verses directly to her, and her granddaughter Marie de Champagne later commissioned Chrétien de Troyes to write his Arthurian romances. The ideals of fin'amor she helped promote permeated European poetry from Dante's Vita Nuova to Petrarch's Canzoniere and beyond.