This is a super Conversation with Tyler. Helen Castor is an historian specializing in the Middle Ages.
When asked what drew her to her scholarship, she answers.
CASTOR: What an interesting question. I think I’m preoccupied by the human dimension, and that’s why the focus of my interest goes in two directions. One is psychological, that I am always trying to work out what makes my protagonists tick from moment to moment, even though I’m trying to work across five or six hundred years. That’s what I love, trying to get inside their minds and see through their eyes.
The other thing I’m preoccupied with is the functioning of power. I think that’s why I love the Middle Ages, because I’ve always felt, in looking at modern history, that I get bamboozled by structures, by the institutions through which power is expressed and mediated.
What I find fascinating about the Middle Ages in England is that you’re looking at a very sophisticated structure of power, but it’s present in bare bones because we don’t have the great apparatus of state. Therefore, individual choices and individual psychology become extremely exposed, so it’s that point where skeletal structures of power are being inhabited by particular individuals, and how that plays out. I think that’s where my interest lies, and therefore that’s where I’m hoping to contribute.
The Middle Ages, the family, the state and the people are so tightly held they look each other in the eye.
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