Portrait of Helen Castor
Reading List
Helen Castor
Historian and Broadcaster
Helen Castor is a British historian of medieval and Tudor England, formerly a fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
Blood and Roses (2004) told the Wars of the Roses through the Paston family’s letters. She-Wolves (2010) recovered the women who ruled England before Elizabeth, among them Matilda, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella and Margaret of Anjou, and became a BBC series. Joan of Arc: A History (2014) approached Joan without hindsight, and The Eagle and the Hart (2024) sets Richard II against Henry IV.
She presents history programmes for BBC radio and television.
The King’s Two Bodies
A Study in Medieval Political Theology
by Ernst Kantorowicz
“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.” — via Interview, August 2011
Monuments and Maidens
The Allegory of the Female Form
by Marina Warner
“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.” — via Interview, August 2011
The Weaker Vessel
Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England
by Antonia Fraser
“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.” — via Interview, August 2011
My Heart Is My Own
The Life of Mary Queen of Scots
by John Guy
“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.” — via Interview, August 2011
The Empress Matilda
Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English
by Marjorie Chibnall
“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.” — via Interview, August 2011