Eight weeks after her marriage to Louis VII of France was annulled in March 1152, Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry, Count of Anjou, who became Henry II of England in 1154. This union joined the duchy of Aquitaine — the heartland of troubadour culture — to the Angevin empire stretching from Scotland to the Pyrenees. Eleanor's cultural influence now reached an even wider stage, and her court at Poitiers became in the 1160s a celebrated gathering point for poets, musicians, and storytellers. The marriage's political and cultural consequences shaped English and French literature for generations.

The Angevin court under Henry and Eleanor supported some of the most significant literary productions of the twelfth century, including Wace's Roman de Brut (dedicated to Eleanor) and Thomas of Britain's Tristan. The court of Poitiers, where Eleanor held a regency, was later associated with Andreas Capellanus's De Amore, a treatise on courtly love that influenced the conventions of love poetry for centuries. The marriage cemented the cross-Channel literary culture in which Anglo-Norman and French verse flourished together.