Helen Castor's Reading List

"This is a wonderful piece of authoritative medieval history. Marjorie Chibnall is a historian I admire enormously. The book isn’t aimed at telling a rollicking good story, but it is careful in its judgement and superbly scholarly. What it opened up for me was all the possibilities of the 12th-century world. I came to this as a late-medieval historian, because the area that I worked on first of all was the 15th century. I taught all the way back to the Norman Conquest, but I hadn’t actually written about the 12th century before. I think we often imagine that historical developments are more linear than they really are. So we imagine that the further we go back in history, the more restricted the role of women is likely to have been. When I looked at this book, I realised that wasn’t the case. It really opened up for me all the unpredictability and possibilities of the post-Conquest world. Exactly. In the century or so after 1066 there weren’t clear precedents about how things should be done in this newly Normanised England. And there weren’t enveloping institutions that had their own established ways of doing things. And this meant that women actually had much more room for political manoeuvre because everything was up for grabs. So this very scholarly and deeply researched book helped open that up for me. It’s difficult to paint a very personal picture of her. What we don’t have is anything personal that comes directly from her, other than the most formal and legal documents. But in the 12th century there were extraordinary chroniclers – so you do get a powerful sense of Matilda as a formidable woman. She left England at the age of eight to marry Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and was brought up in Germany as the consort of this most powerful king. She had a formidable political education, which meant that when her husband died relatively young and she came back to England as a widowed empress, she really knew her stuff, and had a real sense of her own majesty. This puts a very interesting slant on the fact that she was then, by her opponents in England, labelled insufferably haughty, arrogant and proud. But the people who were accusing her of being domineering would never have said that about a powerful king, such as her father [Henry I] had been. Even though there were no rules to say she couldn’t inherit her father’s throne, once she got to the brink of power there was a sense that it wasn’t acceptable. And that’s the interesting thing I wanted to tease out – and this book provides the foundations for anyone wanting to do that. It also helped me focus on the different things that I wanted to do in writing for a rather different audience. For example, when Matilda was married to the Holy Roman Emperor they travelled from Germany to Italy in February 1116 – and there’s a single sentence in Marjorie Chibnall’s book where she remarks that they took an army over an Alpine pass in February."

"The thing I admire so much about John Guy’s work is his ability to go into the archive and bring an extraordinary forensic eye to bear on documents which have already been pored over by generations of historians – and yet to bring something new to it. He re-examined the Casket Letters, which are the letters on the basis of which Mary, Queen of Scots had been accused of responsibility for the murder of her husband, Lord Darnley. Yes, and the Casket Letters are the documents that supposedly prove her guilt. But what John Guy did was to go back and unpick them and not be satisfied with transcripts. Instead he looked at the physical documents in order to construct a new argument that suggested that Mary had been framed. It was the forensic skill with which he did that which was so good. I did find it compelling. I’m no expert on the life of Mary, Queen of Scots – but I think there is so much excitement in history when someone can go back to the original evidence and express their detailed findings in a book aimed at a wide readership. Again, I’m interested in different ways of writing history and that seemed to me to be a phenomenally interesting combination of things."

"This is one of the idiosyncratic things on this list, because the obvious thing to choose would have been another of her books, The Warrior Queen, which is much more obviously about queens and power, and is a great book as well. But The Weaker Vessel , which is a social history of women in 17th-century England, was really the first book that, a long time ago, made me think about the experience of being female in history. All the pervasiveness of the social, cultural and historical assumptions about what it means to be male or female come into play in this book. Even though it’s a book about the 17th century and I work in previous centuries, I still find it very thought provoking about the personal experience and the social assumptions that have an effect when you’re confronted by the idea of a woman who rules. Antonia Fraser starts her preface by quoting another historian she’d been talking to, who asked, “ Were there any women in 17th-century England?” – and I know exactly what it feels like to be confronted with that kind of question. Absolutely. Even Matilda – who clearly did end up featuring in the chronicles – was for a long time left in the margins of her own story, precisely because of the difficulty for a woman of having political agency. I’m saying developments aren’t always linear – but there are a lot of continuities. In fact, the striking thing writing about female rule in the medieval and Tudor periods is how striking the parallels are with 20th- and 21st-century politics. Yes, the parallels are extraordinary. People often say, “Well, these problems can be overcome – look at Elizabeth I or Margaret Thatcher.” But what those two women both did was not say, “Women can rule, women can hold power.” They both said, “Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.” Well, exactly. Look at the iconography of them both, and it’s all about being the exception to the rule. There was Margaret Thatcher presiding over an all-male cabinet. Both of them distanced themselves from other women. Elizabeth I said she had “the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king” – and that battle is still with us. Look at the cabinet now: There’s Theresa May, and we know more about her shoes than anything else. And in other parts of the world where women have taken positions of leadership, it’s often been possible because politics is dynastic. If you look at India or Pakistan, it’s much more akin to a monarchical system where dynastic legitimacy can validate a woman. The parallels are very interesting. So, coming back to your question, there is a lot of continuity – but, within that, for example, there are much more clearly articulated arguments against women’s rule in the 16th century than there are in the 12th. So it isn’t completely linear, and we need to be wary of assuming that."

"Yes, and my last two choices make an interesting pair for me, because they’re both about culture, symbolism and language. And I think Marina Warner’s work is phenomenally interesting. It’s the kind of history I could never write, so I love pouring myself into it. What’s so interesting is the way in which, in our culture, female figures become a vessel for abstract ideas. It’s interesting, too, that Antonia Fraser’s book has that word in its title. So the figures of justice, victory and liberty, for example, are all female. And Marina Warner comments in her conclusion that, “Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.” In other words, the difficulty for women is agency; it’s doing something and being an actor in the narrative. Being an abstract embodiment is what women can do much more easily in our culture, which is why I think having queens now works quite well – because monarchs are required to be , rather than to do . But if you go back to the 16th century, monarchs had to rule – and that was where it became much more difficult for women to take that role."

"The whole idea of The King’s Two Bodies is that of the divide between the king’s natural body and his representation of the body politic, a more abstract political authority. Those two things come together and have to be worked out in law and authority and language – but it’s always a male body. The physical being of the king is part of that relationship, and the fact is that the very different connotations of the female body make the relationship between a queen and the body politic much harder. The male body is politically neutral, but the female body is sexualised, whether as sinful Eve or the Virgin Mary. It’s very difficult for a queen, as a woman – who’s constructed after all in biblical terms as the lesser being – to find neutral political ground to stand on. Yes, but sometimes she would also harness it in ways that were going to bolster her. For example, her virginity became a useful political tool over the years, but it was a complex process. The emphasis on her virginity in some senses emphasised her sexuality, and she did run a very sexualised court, with all her courtiers required to be “in love” with her. But of course if her virginity bolstered her power in the present, it also meant she couldn’t do the one thing that all kings are meant to do which is to continue their line and produce an heir. I think I discovered that it’s a narrative which is still with us – and that’s one of the things I loved about telling those women’s stories. It’s frustrating, of course, to look around us in the modern world and discover those same things still happening to some extent – but I love that sense of the connectedness of history, that sense that the past is with us. And the other thing that became profoundly important to me as I was writing was the extent to which hindsight dictates our understanding of the past more often than we think it does. That’s not a new thought – but I think it affects us more than we realise. That quest to go back to the moment and see the past through the eyes of the people who were there is so exciting to strive for as a historian."