Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You studied history at Cambridge and for many years you were the director of studies in history at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. What first got you interested in history?
I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t love it. When I was tiny what caught my imagination, like so many other people, were the Tudors. You can hardly get a better story than Henry VIII and his six wives, and it grabbed me when I was really very, very small. I grew up reading whatever I could get my hands on, initially about Tudor England, and then I worked backwards into the Middle Ages, which became the thing that I ended up specialising in. But history, for me, has always been about the human story, combined with the question of how power works. I’m very much a political historian. And narrative is what I love writing, which is why my career has taken the path it has.
And, why, in particular, queens and power?
That’s the interesting thing. My background isn’t in social history, gender studies or women’s history – I’m a political historian. So I came to this from the power angle, rather than the women angle. But if you’re interested in the 16th century, women loom very large in that history – but not in an unproblematic way. So I was thinking about the point in the middle of the 16th century in England when there were enormous convulsions in the political landscape caused by Henry VIII’s attempt to have a son – only for the son that he eventually did have to die at the age of just 15.
The difficulty is, when we look at this period, we know so well what’s coming next so it can be quite hard to investigate it without hindsight. But it suddenly struck me that this was the point at which England was going to have a reigning queen, come what may, because the only people left on the Tudor family tree were women. So that then made me think about women and power in the Middle Ages. And it turned out to be a fascinating and fruitful area of history to explore.
Your first choice is a biography of the 12th-century Empress Matilda by Marjorie Chibnall
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.
This was the Norman Conquest.
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.
What was Empress Matilda like as a person?
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.
Helen Castor is a historian, writer and broadcaster. Her latest book, She-Wolves, tells the stories of the medieval and Tudor queens who ruled England before Elizabeth I. It was selected as one of the books of the year for 2010 in The Guardian, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Financial Times and BBC History Magazine. She regularly presents the BBC Radio 4 programme Making History, and is a speaker at Hire Intelligence
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