Helen Castor Interview: Empress or Queen Matilda?

In the second of our Book Club podcasts, Helen Castor, author of She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, discusses Matilda (1102-67) and the claim made by some historians that she was England’s first true female ruler. Castor looks at the civil war, the ‘anarchy’, that broke out between the forces of Matilda and her rival claimant Stephen of Blois (r. 1141-54), ‘when Christ and his saints slept’. Matilda’s precedent was to prove a complex one, only to be resolved satisfactorily with the accession of Mary Tudor in 1553, the starting point of Castor’s study. Can we regard Matilda as England’s first ruling queen? And does the traditional divide of 1485 between Medieval and Tudor England help or hinder historians?